The prospect of a virgin smoker is one that both entices and fills with apprehension. As an audience, you are going in entirely blind. For all we know, we could be about to witness the inauguration into the Cambridge comedy scene of a dozen future greats. That said, you could also be about to spend an hour or so of your evening squirming in your seat, while a string of awkward Freshers shuffle from foot to foot, looking as if the microphone clutched between their sweaty palms is a bomb about to go off. Unfortunately for last night’s viewers of Corpus’s first smoker in a series of virgin affairs, the experience veered more towards the latter scenario.

I don’t blame them – to be honest there is no way I could ever be brave enough to do such a thing myself – but, for the most part, this bunch of comics found their performances quashed by their obvious inexperience - that might have been the point of the evening, but it didn't make it any better for the audience. Jokes fell flat, with slapstick humour regarding the nature of pedestrian crossings failing to come up trumps and one sketch, pondering the origins of the universe and whether mathematicians were allowed to ask ‘why’, becoming so convoluted as to entirely lose the audience well before the punch line – if there was one. Other topics of abuse included well-worn favourites such as ‘I’m from the north so Cambridge is really weird’ and ‘I’m female and have short hair so I’m a lesbian’, but these failed to be delivered with the panache and innovative flair that would inject life in to such age-old gripes.

Nonetheless, the joy of the nature of a smoker is that there are enough performers and comedians to hope that some will come up trumps. This occasion was no exception. In fact, the evening kicked off to a relatively good start with the opening act, Yaseen Kader, finding some laughs in the form of a good, old fashioned pun about personifying a ‘virgin smoker’, ('only joking, I’ve never smoked.') Also, we were offered a delightful taste of musical comedy, with a melancholy, folk-style ballad recounting the final moments of a marriage in the wake of both members stepping out of the closet – cue lots of rude words and sexual innuendoes, all delivered by a single guitar-strumming chap voicing both Mr and Mrs.

Speaking of sexual innuendoes, another highlight that deserves to be recognised in the wake of what was otherwise quite a disappointing evening was a sketch featuring a sailor’s letter to his beloved. Points must be awarded for the greatest number of navy-orientated innuendoes and puns ever uttered under a single roof in one night. There were other moments besides these – Rory Boyd's explanation of the importance of which side of your trousers housed your penis was delivered with just the right level of angry Scottish accent and violent gesture. Rich Hodges' confession of twatishness had enough enthusiasm and gleeful non-apology to make it appear novel and Fred Maynard's tirade on Facebook’s quantification of popularity struck several chords.

One of the highlights of the night, however, was a closing speech by Helen Charman on the characterization of supermarkets, which featured the personification of the Sainsbury’s Basics range as a needy, self-delusional middle-age divorcee (complete with desperate hand gestures, a high-pitched whine and manic, wide-eyed attempts at seduction). So this particular virgin smoker was not without its moments of true comedy. Nonetheless, for me, these were marred by the (sometimes unbearably) uncomfortable skits and stand-ups that came in between. Virgins or no, the not-so-great was accentuated by the flashes of brilliance, inevitably leaving the audience disappointed that we hadn’t just skipped the rest.