On first leaving the theatre after this week's Smoker I felt, sadly, that it had fallen pretty flat - an amalgamation of poor one-liners and cheesy singing. I hadn't had my fill of laughs. Yet looking back, this seems unfair: there were some fantastic performances that suggested that experience - this was a Virgin Smoker - isn't essential to great comedy.

The sketches that worked best involved a central conceit that was both well thought-out and well executed. A highlight, perhaps, was a sketch set in an art gallery which relied just as much on facial expression as on things said. A man listens to a guide to the paintings on his headset, and the

voice gets more and more commanding until the man is made to kneel before a picture and bark like a poodle. The final painting, of a 'performer who just wants to be loved', was one of the brilliant moments when a sketch gently mocked its own theatricality.

Another sketch involved the test for a 'walking licence', a piece that managed to successfully engage and entertain by taking its central conceit and pushing it, consistently 'upping' the bizarreness of the situation until we were shown various 'walking manoeuvres' (the pedestrian version of the three-point turn). A parody of Pride and Prejudice- “how should I wear my hair?” “Brazilian - I hear there's a great place in Meriton” - was similarly successful due to its capacity to develop its initial idea and crescendo in humour.

Whereas these sketches worked, many of the routines over-milked their original concept: ideas which would have worked as part an act became monotonous when they became the whole thing, leaving no room for development. One act, which started well with the performer coming on stage with a cloth tied around his mouth - “that was my first gag!” - proceeded to build his entire routine on fragmented one-liners which quickly grew stale. And the closing song about the woes of dating a 'chewer' suffered from a similar problem in that it seemed to end before it had really begun.

Yet some of the comedy was as much 'standout' as it was stand-up. Zoe Tomalin brilliantly entertained the audience which her self-confessed quirkiness - “several of us at Christ's are fighting it out to occupy the same, quirky niche”, and Angus Graham Morrison’s joke about 'fraping the pope' came to a hilarious climax: “The pope added Richard Dawkins to his list of inspirational people”.

The decision of the actors in one sketch to step out of themselves and parody the act of writing theatre was particularly funny; the sketch involved a director, unsatisfied with his work, appealing to the audience for a new setting for his play. It served to remind me of the importance of a gel between content and style: this Smoker was successful when performance and content came together - when the performers showed little awareness of their presence on stage, it fell flat.

As Elizabeth tells Jane in the Jane Austen sketch, “one must consider the finer details” - and this, potentially, was where the smoker as a whole fell down. It was fairly long, which militated against a sense of its substantial content: I tended to forget about how many good acts there had been since they had seemed so infrequently dispersed among less successful ones.