It's the 31st of October. Halloween. The night (as Wikipedia kindly informs me) of 'telling scary stories and watching horror films', when skeletons haunt the streets and young school children transform suddenly into Lucifer. But the laughs were in plentiful supply in Corpus playroom as Pierre Novellie opened this week's Smoker. And laughs weren't the only rewards on the menu: Novellie informed an excited audience that they were to be given prizes.

Split into two (something any past visitor of the Corpus playroom will know is only two easy), each team was awarded a freshly bought, Sainsbury's finest, swede. Armed such, we were ready for the smoker, prepared to laugh on this scariest of scary nights. And this was a smoker that shone at points, but- perhaps fittingly for All Hallows' Eve- not always because of its humour. The highlight - other than Novellie's brilliant compering which involved jokes both about his heritage and his beard- was Lawrence Bowles: his two numbers on the ukulele worked not just because they were comic, but also because they were brilliantly polished performances, taking into account both facial and vocal expression.

The first was his version of a 'love song': and he announced that he was going to make eye contact with one member of the audience the whole way through, just to make it that bit more uncomfortable. This was more a love song to BDSM: 'hit me baby one more time'. A future hit for sure (please excuse the terrible pun). Bowles' second number was about teenage rebellion, that stage when we give up 'knitting and baking' and 'rebel a little bit'. The lyrics were not only funny but also proved a genuinely interesting reflection on the woes of adolescence. The song finished with the words 'I'm going to make my mark in my own way'- and Bowles certainly did.

Lowell Bellfield had earlier made the joke that, to do musical comedy, 'you don't have to be good at stand up or singing, but you will get applause after every song'. And indeed, Nathan Gower's succeeding song and guitar playing was extremely well-delivered and engaging, but lacked the comic edge. Bellfield's own number- a 'lullaby any future child of Will and Kate'- was performed confidently, but he suffered sadly from nerves during the earlier part of his routine. And this was the general trend- and problem- with this smoker: there were few all-round routines. 'Decent' is the word to describe it; a performer who excelled in one area would fall down in another.

A good idea did not always transmit into a good set: Ken Cheng's concept for his routine- to mention having been previously given a bad review because of 'inconsistency and incoherency' and to jokingly try and improve by using a 'table of contents'- was clever and creative, but not entirely pragmatic. After spending a good three minutes reflecting on 'the situation where you do get a bad review' (slightly awkward for me), he announced the structure of his main routine, which then came and went in a flash, leaving the audience unsure of what had comprised the body of his act. It didn't get the balance quite right.

The smoker was enjoyable, and there were no flops, but also- apart from Novellie- few moments of brilliance. His system of calling upon each 'team' of spectators after each act for their opinion was innovative and created a novel framework in which to structure the night as a whole. And I left the room shaped like a Tetris game (as Novellie put it), accompanied by one swede, having had a good time. The night was more fun than funny - which, a few days before the onset of week five, is no bad thing.