A pinecone with the body of a fish – a pinefish, according to Ruby Keane – gave this hour-long monologue its title. Keane, the writer and performer of the evening, could be the result of the union between Miranda Hart and David Mitchell, wonderfully combining everything I dislike about Hart with everything I love about Mitchell. She is smart and sarcastic, but at the same time she seems to want you to think she’s a bit of a ditz, which she’s definitely not.

Keane has a very sharp wit and her wordplay is satisfying, but she does take a bit of warming to, partly because many of her jokes feel a bit forced and the surreal elements of her routine felt somewhat immature at times. Once she had got into the swing of things, however, it was a very entertaining show.

The performance made use of gross-out humour with varying degrees of success. Sometimes it was a bit too obvious that the punchline was going to be her anus, but at times this could be used to great effect, such as her immature gag about getting back at a man ogling her bum in the park by farting at him (I suppose you had to be there).

I don’t think that Keane lets herself down by using these kinds of jokes, which she can do well, but I don’t think she always lets her intelligence shine through. Earlier in the show the immature humour meant that the thought that went into the performance was not always clear, but then the wit of the writing became obvious over the course of the performance: I wish that it had been obvious the entire time. I don’t mind that she is a bit self-deprecating, but at times this also under-emphasises her strengths.

One of the best components to the act was her repeatedly picking on a man in the front row, using him as a silent heckler, someone to talk directly to that helped introduce her jokes. This teasing was effective and she often combined it with a repeated joke which the audience member was apparently making. She seems to be taking a bit of a cue from Stewart Lee with this kind of material and even had a ‘you see what I did there’ part where she explained the joke to the audience. This was done well, making good use of meta-theatrical components.

Keane’s routine centred on her returning to Cambridge to begin her fourth-year, trying to find a job and an apartment, apparently falling victim to a scam real estate agent, and the effect this had on her. It was effectively observational humour: thinking about job interviews and paranoia during house hunting – all the kind of day dreaming you do when you’re at work to distract yourself. But it had a neurotic, introspective slant, giving a good insight to her inner monologue: one of my favourite jokes was her thinking that surely the landlord of a narrow boat should be a sealord.

While saying she had a complicated relationship with gimmicks, Keane used two in the last five minutes of the act. The first – finishing a running joke about a buffering Tudor song by dancing with her victim in the audience – was initially effective but seemed to carry on for a bit too long. The second gimmick was significantly better: after searching for something to throw in to the crowd, she settled on her hair, which she then cut a large hank from. She revealed that, along with the proceeds from the show, this hair would be donated to the Little Princess Trust (a charity which uses donated hair to make wigs for children suffering hair loss).

I thoroughly enjoyed the last forty minutes of Pinefish after Keane had warmed up, but before that she felt somewhat forced, and any surrealism fell a bit flat for me. I would definitely keep an eye on her, and especially anything that she has had a hand in writing, because she is an intelligent, funny writer, even if at times her delivery needs a little bit of practice.