Is there a funnier comic in Britain than Tim Vine? After laughing like a tipsy gibbon at his latest dizzying collection of stupid one-liners, daft props and silly songs, I'm struggling to think of anyone more likely to cheer up a room .

Mind you, he's not deep. “Can you remember a word of that?” asked one punter to another, as we filed happily out at the end, and I hugged my notebook tightly. He doesn't live on in the memory with the same force as the great character acts (The Pub Landlord), the great storytellers (Billy Connolly), the great subversives (Stewart Lee), the great funny uncles (Harry Hill).

But funny? The word a comedy critic should say with the same reluctance as a music critic says “musical”? Tim Vine is seriously funny. And if he's not funny, he's nothing, because his act has nothing to hide behind except its at tempts to make us laugh. Out loud. Constantly.

“Can you smile more loudly?” he pleads at the start of this show, Punslinger, firing out puns in his crappy cowboy outfit: “I thought I'd start out with the cowboy jokes. I've got seven and they're magnificent.” Could this be where his big brother Jeremy got the idea for his ill-fated recent cowboy routine on Newsnight?

Leave it to the pro, Jeremy. Tim monkeys with meaning with lines assembled as tightly as haikus. On their own, they're Christmas cracker jokes rather than transcendent: “So I saw this crow going crazy: he was raven mad.” But six of them a minute, told fast and fearlessly, open up the portal to a parallel world where rigid meanings become too silly for words.

Vine was once in the Guinness World Records for telling 499 jokes in an hour. He wouldn't be much without them. But his delivery is more important still. He wrangles each stupid play on words with the same childlike enthusiasm.

I've tried watching him on DVD and it's not the same: it's a bloke telling a lot of jokes. Live, we're all complicit in the sheer effrontery of his style. He's not cool, edgy, or cynical, he's just daft. But brightly, tightly, inventively, ruthlessly professionally daft. It looks effortless but it's incredibly gutsy.

Tim Vine is never going to change the world. But his unswerving devotion to making us laugh is something pure and wonderful.

On tour. Next show tonight, Bloomsbury Theatre (020-7388 8822)

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