I guess it's one of those quintessential activities of the Cambridge undergraduate, dressing up in black tie to go and enjoy a civilised evening of comedy. Now I just need to get into the Conservative Association's port and cheese party and the lacrosse girls' picnic and I can graduate with my head held high.

So there I waited in the pleasant setting of the Pembroke Old Library (which had strangely few books, do only new libraries have books?). Suddenly a barbershop quartet sprang into view singing a weird song to which the evening's compère, Will McAdam, was carried on to stage. Just the kind of quirky opening a comedy night should have, I mused.

From there we embarked on a full two-hour comedic roller-coaster interspersed, thankfully, with an interval. While stand up dominated the evening, sketches from Mark Fiddaman and Simon Haines as well as character monologues from Will Hensher and Grace Dring provided a welcome contrast.

Lucien Young got the show going in earnest at the start of the second half: "What can I tell you about me? Well, my star sign is Virgo, the virgin... that's proved eerily prophetic. At least it wasn't Cancer I suppose." After the more nervous acts of the first half we needed someone like Lucien, who was just incredibly relaxed in front of the audience.

He was soon followed by Katy Bulmer's brilliantly perverse poem about two friends having a dying competition: "he got his own back on me when he buried himself alive." For her troubles, she won "best act of the night" in the strange cheering competition that the organisers, for some reason, decided to have at the end.

The final, lengthy act from Liam Williams had the audience guffawing for a good ten minutes. His self-deprecating gags focused on woman troubles. "For me" he declared, "women are like dogs. In the sense that, no matter how hard I try, I just can't get them to talk to me." At the point in the narrative when he finally got a girl back to his place he revealed, "she had the body of a goddess... a fat, ugly goddess."

The main problem though was that they had back-loaded their best material. The first half paled in comparison to the second. Had any one of Lucien Young, Katy Bulmer or Liam Williams appeared before the break we would have had a much more balanced night. Ultimately though, this was a very enjoyable evening and it certainly left me keen to don my tuxedo for the next Pembroke Players' Black Tie Smoker. By Joel Massey