"You know when you’re in hospital with your dying mother and you fail to notice her die?"

So begins Wingman, a play somewhat recklessly billed to me as a comedy, fresh from Edinburgh’s fringe.

It’s a buddy comedy, a propless two-man show written and narrated by In Betweeners-alike Richard Marsh about losing his mother to cancer and being left to mother his absentee father Len (Jerome Wright) who turns up begging his son’s forgiveness for all the years he wasn’t around.

Marsh slips seamlessly between banter with his bad dad and heartfelt poetic monologues to the audience. The humour is laddy and comes mostly in bite-size jokes, like when Len takes the last of the straws Richard lovingly bought for his dying mother to drink tea in her hospital bed (There was one straw left in the packet. Which he has taken. It’s the last straw).

Len is an habitual liar, and concocts a story that the final wish of Richard’s mother’s was that the two men should scatter her ashes in the Lake District, a trip they are about to embark on when it emerges a work colleague (Brigitte) that Richard had had a messy encounter with in a disabled toilet at a Christmas party is now pregnant with his child. Len inexplicably sticks around, turning up at the most inopportune moments, like the evening Richard tries to reignite relations with his baby’s mother.

The wacky scene where Len insists father and son take a bath together (below), the bit where Richard kisses Brigitte’s belly at the ultrasound scan only to get a face full of gel (slaps forehead), the name of the rubbish dump where they go in search of mum’s ashes which Richard hid in a dried baby milk can to stop Len finding them only to be thrown away by Brigitte (Mucking Marshes) all get uproarious laughs from an audience who clearly came along to laugh, and by gum, were determined to.

I came to watch a comedy, and I didn’t laugh. But, by the time the play ends and Marsh steps out of character, I realised with no props or scenery at all I had actually been transported to Mucking Marshes in the spring and I actually cared about these hapless idiots.