I will guiltily admit that the primary reason I wanted to see this show was for its witty title. As ever, the Great Pierre Novellie, whom I have been more or less stalking around Cambridge, was one step ahead of me, galumphing onstage with the opening gambit, ‘‘Wow’, you thought, ‘with such a witty title, the stand-up must be AMAZING!’’ This ability to gauge and pre-empt the crowd’s reaction was a boon to Novellie throughout. 

His ad-libbing was razor-sharp: when his crowd-sourcing seemed poised to backfire, getting slightly lost in translation with the Italian man he’d picked on, he turned it around by spinning a political satire on Swiss mediocrity and Italian iniquity. Novellie also had some great tricks up his sleeve for getting the whole crowd involved, creating an ongoing drama of audience-kingdoms which glued his compèring set-pieces together. As with shows I have seen him compère previously, Novellie absolutely stole it. 

Ali Lewis, a self-dubbed ‘Jake Gyllensmall’ - if you ever see Lewis, you will soon realise the astonishing appropriateness of this nickname - was less adept at ad-hoc than his host. Perhaps unfairly, I’d already seen Lewis at the Corpus Smoker last term, so much of his material was familiar to me. Though this left me in an unusual position, I was nevertheless disappointed by the lack of energy in Lewis’ delivery this time round, which I reckon was obvious to most. Though bracingly frank about his sexual insecurities, I felt this became too much of a hobbyhorse, weighing his comedy down. 

I wasn’t sure about the choice of having two fidgety, awkward styles of comedy back-to-back. Lowell Belfield, who has in the past really struck me as a talented comic actor (Pick Me Up was by far the best comedy I’ve seen in Cambridge), didn’t translate as well into stand-up. Fair enough, he was the special guest, and probably less prepped than the others. And yes, his set got off to a rocketing start with a dandruff-related anecdote. My objections were that firstly his manner was too schoolboyish (though his fixation with paedophiles did seem to warrant a chortle), and secondly that by the end of the set he seemed visibly uncomfortable. 

Novellie, however, was close at hand, coming to the rescue with some more brilliant and varied comedy: it’s unusual to see a comic who can switch so smoothly from reeling off politically perspicacious comedy about the desperate capitalism of Cambridge colleges, to bewailing the curse of being “too tall to club”. Slightly more jarring (though by no means unheard of amongst Cambridge comics) was the casual misogyny being kicked about stage: Lewis jokingly compared a girl he’d slept with a pig from Angry Birds; Novellie jibed that a drunk girl had approached him in a club, “because that’s where they grow”. Nobody likes a spoilsport, but girls definitely get a bad wrap with these guys. 

Ahir Shah, a floppy-haired, spaghetti-legged dandy, rounded things up with some impressive strutting and expatiating on being both a Lad and a Hindu, making some shameless remarks about milking his being a racial minority for laughs: in his own words, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it”. His cracking out a cigarette towards the end of his set definitely dulled Shah’s quasi-professional sheen, and served as an unhelpful distraction to the audience. Admittedly, the fag did serve as something of a straight-talking backdrop to the sob-story with which he finished his set. Unpredictably, this note of earnest tied the gig together quite satisfyingly, inverting the same note of political comedy with which it had begun.