Des Bishop, Soho Theatre

As the audience files in, James Bond title songs accompany a looped clip from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was George Lazenby’s sole outing as 007. There’s a reason, as this funny, touching but wholly unsentimental show is a sort of comic tribute to Des Bishop’s father, Mike, who auditioned for the role after Sean Connery hung up his Walther PPK in 1968.

A strikingly handsome man, Mike Bishop was a model before he became an actor, and those of a certain vintage will remember him as “the Condor man” in 1970s advertisements for the pipe tobacco. But as he started married life he decided to settle for more steady employment in fashion retail, a job he excelled at, to give his sons a decent life as they grew up in an Irish-American enclave in Flushing Meadows, New York. Des Bishop moved to Ireland when he was a teenager and the mixed geography of his upbringing has given him not only a beautifully twisted accent - a Queens twang mixed with an Irish lilt - but an outsider’s acutely observational view of people and their foibles.

Bishop senior, as the comic tells the story, clearly hankered after his previous life and in late 2009 was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer; but if all this sounds horribly serious and uncomedic, in Des Bishop’s hands it’s anything but. He is relentlessly upbeat in a show that speeds by and knows when to undercut a serious moment with a self-deprecating aside; to this end Bishop, like fellow Irish comic Jason Byrne in his recent show, makes effective use of embarrassing childhood photos and video excerpts from his father’s showreel, which includes clips from Zulu and The Day of the Triffids. Bishop describes it as a terrible movie and tells how he and his brothers would quote its dreary dialogue to mock their dad when he tried to discipline them.

Along the way he talks about being a porn-obsessed teenager and the shock of puberty - “You’re obsessed about getting pubic hair... you don’t expect it to turn up on your head,” as another bad-hair-day picture pops up on screen. Bishop notes that James Bond may have been a ladies’ man but must surely have spent time in a clap clinic because “he never fumbles for a condom” in the films, and how his father’s wicked sense of humour came to the fore only after he knew he was dying - he joked that doing the Condor ad gave him lung cancer and recalled some sexual exploits of his own that involved pleasuring a dog.

Other comics, such as Jason Cook and Russell Kane, have successfully covered similarly thought-provoking and emotional territory about their fathers, and I’m astonished that this show was not recognised for an award at the Edinburgh Fringe last year, where it sold out and received huge critical acclaim. Bishop’s father, now dead (he made an appearance in some Edinburgh shows), could be the ghost in the room, but the comic has crafted too good a show for that and, despite the occasional self-indulgent lapse into deconstructing his own material or the audience’s response to a gag, this is an object lesson in how to make an intensely personal show into a joyous and laughter-filled 75 minutes.

• Buy tickets for Des Bishop at Soho Theatre, London W1 until 14 May
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Watch a clip of Des Bishop