About a third of the way through this spoken word show, John Waters quotes the incorrigible Warhol superstar Brigid Berlin asking: “How can we be bad in our 70s?” At 67, Waters – auteur of such infamous underground film classics as Pink Flamingos, the latter of which concludes with an indelible scene of his star Divine eating freshly-laid dog shit – is clearly pondering the same question, despite the fact that the mainstream embraced him years ago. Hairspray, the musical based on his 1988 film, won eight Tony awards, ran for seven years on Broadway and three in the West End, and is performed all over the world. With a certain self-mocking pride, Waters points out that the 2007 film remake is the fourth most successsful Hollywood musical. “All my dreams came true years ago,” he admitted in a recent newspaper interview.

Nevertheless, Waters is still a figurehead for a particular type of misfit – angry, subversive, creative and funny – though as society rightly becomes more inclusive, the margins Waters and his crew relished living on are getting as narrow as his famous moustache. Then again, as Waters recognises, human nature will ensure that the bizarre continues to thrive, particularly among sexual subcultures. In his uproarious and loosely autobiographical talk, Waters introduces us to the concept of a blouse (a “feminine top”, and he’s not talking about an item of clothing), reacquaints us with sploshers (people who derive sexual pleasure from being covered in custard and baked beans), and talks about “blossoms”, the result of an esoteric sexual practice not really suitable for a family website.

Taking the stage in a baggy suit covered in large squares, Waters is a fantastic raconteur, with a rat-a-tat delivery that would credit any standup comic. His life with characters like childhood friend Divine (“It still shocks me that he’s dead,” Waters admits in a rare moment of seriousness) has provided him with an endless fund of ripe anecdote, like the time he made the famously rotund drag queen act on his hands and knees in a pigsty, which prompted the surrounding swine to start mating: “Divine was pig porn!”

There’s plenty of Waters’ famous bad taste, but as the director knows, it’s all in the way you tell them, and the more outrageous the gag, the more the audience laughs. Though Waters long ago swapped the rough and tumble of movies (his last film was in 2004) for the art world, his talk is a barnstorming, 90-minute statement of intent to remain disreputable into old age. And beyond. “When we’re dead,” he says of himself and his film troupe, immortalised in the annals of trash, “come fuck on our graves!”