Another Monday, another Smoker. And that, really, might do for a review. I don’t mean to sound jaded, but I felt that the six comics on stage tonight were treading water a little. Stand-ups who are starting out tend to rely on a few tropes of persona which essentially amount to “I’m socially awkward (and yet not so socially awkward as, say, the kind of person who would think twice before standing on stage in front of a bunch of strangers with nothing but my wit to entertain them), and I’m bad with women/men, and I masturbate/ dislike the size of my breasts”.

All of these can be funny, but when six different acts seem to be returning to masturbation, porn and loneliness again and again, you get the sense that either the life of a student stand-up is rather bleak, or that there aren’t many ideas going around. We began with the compere, the hard-working Ben Pope, talking about masturbation into cups. His faintly posh, breathless Michael McIntyre-intonationed act is well-adjusted and confident, but it does perhaps grate when the objects of fun are a thick supermarket shelf-stacker and Take A Break! magazine. He is, however, a charming host, and his gifts to the audience were seasonal and generous. I have already cooked the Halloween onion.

Charlie Palmer is a more awkward stage presence, fidgeting a little as he talked about his attempts to chat up a Russian. Unfortunately his act didn’t get the kind of laughs that might have helped him relax; I need only mention the phrase “barrage of bad animal puns” to give you the idea. Llama del Rey, incidentally, is already a meme – the internet has probably killed off most pun-comedy for good, I’m afraid, because gifs do it better than stand-ups. In any case, I lost most sympathy with Palmer when he made a badly-judged “Adele getting very fat” joke – it seemed to glory simply in the image of, well, Adele looking very fat, which I’m afraid just makes me think of the playground bully.

The aggressively well-dressed Josie Bowerman was a likeable presence. She was clearly not happy with the idea of sexiness, her bluff Yorkshire sentiment cutting through wonderbras and the like; comedy, once again, about not fitting in and failing at life. Appealing, though I could have done with more bite. I liked John Bailey, whose complaint about “manliness” was fun, and his point about men getting sexual pleasure in advertising while women have to make do with enjoying chocolate was acute. But these two were still basically doing the “I’m a woman/man, and this is what its like” routine familiar to anyone who’s seen student stand-up.

I felt Sophie Williams had yet to crack the nut of making her spinster’s account of life (yet more loneliness) into a proper comedy routine, though it’s getting there. Ian Sampson finished off fairly strongly, preparing for Tuesday’s Ken Kardashian, with some material about maths-tutoring an attractive younger girl with appropriate age-related mathematics.

These comedians are still finding their feet, and need to strike out beyond the familiar. Like masturbation really – it may be best for you to stick to what you know, but it’s not so much fun for others in the room.