Comedy. Preserve of the imaginative; the quirky… the medic? Beyond television, I’ve never seen the appeal of a funny doctor. I prefer mine lifesaving, logical and at most sardonic over a whisky. The ability to write sketch shows is about as necessary to the medical profession as Harold Shipman - just as a playwright’s ability to perform open heart surgery will hardly help him on to the West End. Sure, J.D and Turk were funny on Scrubs; catastrophe was funny on Casualty, and plastic surgery was funny on Nip Tuck, but the Cambridge med student’s capacity to hit the funny bone is surely impeded by the onset of exam term and all those dreary 9 o' clocks.

My point is, by its very nature, a Medics’ Revue should not be funny. Even a Natsci would struggle to giggle at the idea of ‘The Fantastic Forceps’. All those medics laughing because their practical partner is acting like a tit could simply head down to Cindies at 1 o' clock on a Tuesday and see exactly the same thing - that is, if they weren’t too busy constructing fortresses out of the textbooks that are their usual company of an evening.

These were my thoughts on entry to the Fitzpatrick Hall at 11 tonight. At 1.30 am, most remain.

The Fantastic Forceps was funny, just not very much of it. The punchlines didn’t really punch. I found the Fantastic Four theme that was supposed to draw the loose collection of sketches together silly but uninteresting. Superhero costumes do not guarantee a laugh, at least not to the more discerning. This is not to say I found the whole thing boring. That tall, gangly ginger guy doing a Gollum/Clegg impression was rather amusing, even original. The M & S remix of Rihanna’s S & M: not a whole lot different to three minutes with The Lonely Island, and the Sainsburys self-checkout gag - standard Cambridge student banter - but worked well enough for me. One could appreciate the intelligence behind some sketches, even if they were about as cutting edge as Springwatch.

Perhaps I’m being harsh when I say that the cast were lively and likeable, but actors only in the most limited sense of the word. The best sketches were those rare occasions when the joke itself was on point. For example, the concept of a genuine pizza delivery boy turning up at a porno set to be chastised for his poor performance was in fitting with the generally crude theme of the evening, but nonetheless candy to the scientific baby that was the bulk of the audience, and me.

Others were greeted with silence. When the sketches got political (other than the Gollum example), they didn’t quite manage to do so with any real style. The sketch about student sit-ins was predictable, and as derivative as the lazy voiceover commentaries we were commonly exposed to. I can’t remember a great deal of the rest. The lasting impression was as if a rather strange doctor had been treating me, but he was still a doctor when it came down to it. And I doubt he cares what some hippy hack thinks of his hobbies.