From the universal “racist Aunt Irene, a friend of your grandma’s who we all have”, to the exceedingly particular “stations of the cross made out of cantaloupe melon”, Bad Habits, Monday night's Corpus late show, is unifying, intimately personal, and filled with deeply cathartic laughter.

Emma Plowright is gifted with a singular ability to make the banal and bizarre bits that make up our everyday lives, and, in particular, adolescence, into something utterly hilarious, an ability which she demonstrates with a segment on deodorant spanning the first five minutes of her act. Being able to talk about deodorant and deodorant alone for five whole minutes is much harder than it sounds and making a room full of people not only remain rapt but also reeling with laughter whilst doing so is in itself worthy of a four and a half star rating.

Plowright’s act surprisingly does not dwell too much on her Catholic upbringing and schooling as the show’s marketing would have you believe, describing herself at one point as an “opportunistic Catholic, like an opportunistic pathogen.”

However, the section which she does dedicate to this topic is characteristically and presciently hilarious, and even those not from a Catholic background can appreciate the universal unwilling naïveté of childhood which holy education, particularly surrounding sex, exacerbates. At one point, Plowright describes her childhood paranoia about the possibility of an immaculate conception, and how inadequate biology lessons led her to believe that she could give birth from a somewhat unconventional orifice, meaning that, “I felt like every time I went to the toilet I was playing Russian roulette with my arse. It would be such a shame if I gave birth to the child of Christ and he drowned in a Midlands sewer system.”

As well as religion, her home town, and universal human awkwardness, Plowright’s setlist (written in large capitals using pink and yellow highlighter pen on three sheets of lined paper sellotaped to the corner between the two audience banks) also takes in the deeply personal issues of body image, her experience of mental illness, and overwrought driving instructors aggravating her symptoms of OCD.

“Watching Plowright’s set is a genuinely cathartic experience”

Alone on an almost blank stage and cornered physically by the two banks of audience members, the overriding impression we get in this section of her set, as in the rest of it, is one of unrelenting and self-conscious, but not self-effacing, honesty. We feel a genuine connection to Plowright, and if this connection is not born of sympathising with her experiences, then it is certainly born of empathising with them.

Watching Plowright’s set is a genuinely cathartic experience, but the catharsis here comes not from detachment and a tragic experience, but from a warmth and unity between Plowright and the audience. At the end of her set, Plowright thanked the audience for coming to support her through what seems to be a genuinely harrowing experience of, as she puts it, “crawling into the confessional with you all – but not in a weird way.”

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She then invited us not only to donate to mental health charities online (“I was going to set up a donation bucket, but in the spirit of being depressed, I didn’t get around to it,”) before inviting us all to come to the pub with her afterwards.

Bad Habits is original, heartfelt and funny, and a wonderfully cathartic exam term treat