42, his age: David O'Doherty repeated it frequently throughout his show, in a combination of surprise, despair and wonder. In comparison to his audience, he is ancient, and he clearly feels it.
He has a combined understanding of life as lived and a sweet, endearing vulnerability around his intense existential angst and life issues. He was here five or six years ago when his show was based around his feelings about his then-age and how he felt he had peaked.
Now 42, he does not appear to have got any more of an existential grip, and that is of great benefit and pleasure to us, his audience.
His gig at this year's comedy festival was laughably fluent, heavy with funny moments delivered with rat-a-tat power - a stacking of guffaws in the build-up to grand payoffs.
There was such existential ferocity in some of his stories that I sometimes couldn't catch every word. No matter, the next one was almost guaranteed funny.
His transmogrification of the form of musical comedy through the devices of a low-cost, knee-borne keyboard, half-sung, half-spoken / shouted lyrics and semi-functional musical illiteracy fitted perfectly within the thematic scope of his show as a whole, which was centred on his vague bafflement at life and his inability to master any of it.
One song, about a night he spent out on the town without his phone, captured his full range: ennui, discontent with the modern world, flashes of great understanding and insight occasionally undercut by the vast disappointments at the heart of all great comedy.
