The Forum Ladies Lounge until April 17

ALICE Fraser is a bit like a really good country song — innately, inescapably funny, dripping with pathos, and very likely to make you shed a tear before she’s done.

Raised Buddhist by recovering Catholics in a crumbling house owned by her Jewish Hungarian grandmother, Fraser’s singular take on the world is as smart as it is delightful.

She chronicles the lives and eccentricities of the people living in the other apartments — a manic depressive Chilean gardener, the Christian Hungarian woman upstairs who should be her grandmother’s mortal enemy but somehow isn’t, and the veiled Indian woman downstairs whose personal take on witchcraft involves a lot of potatoes.

Fraser wants you to know that sex isn’t a capitalist enterprise, pigeons are massively underappreciated, and you should never, ever trust your gut.

Her stand-up is poignant and gut-punchingly funny, and when she switches to songs — accompanied by a tiny electric piano or her beloved banjo — none of the gloss wears off.

Despite her set falling down, her props malfunctioning and a miserable old woman in the second row shaking her head for the majority of the show, Fraser totally killed on her first night.

In her opening, she says the difference between comedy and tragedy is when you turn the lights on and off — keep telling any story for long enough and it’s inevitably tragic.

And she takes on this adage like a challenge.

There’s a point in the closing strains of the show where she effectively says, “If you want this to have been a comedy show, leave now”.

If you’re good with tragedy, stay.

And please, for the love of all that you personally consider holy, do not leave.

The tragedy’s worth it.

You could compare her to Daniel Kitson — and indeed others have — but maybe we don’t have to line up any comic who goes somewhere dark next to that infamous, fragile master of ennui.

Alice Fraser’s a total star in her own right, and her weird, messy, joyful, tear-jerking comedy deserves some unadulterated infamy all to itself.

See this show.