As I got to see a stand-up gig this week, and was actually able to see the notes as I was taking them down, I've come away with more than a haphazardly scrawled mess that's written over the top of itself for once. These jottings quote a lot of moronic moments (“I gotta burp, but I don't know when it's gonna come out!” [over]shares headliner Carl Donnelly), flashes of brilliance (Ben Pope's description of someone looking like “a novelty clock made out of overcooked bacon” was nicely done) and a lot of jokes that were so excruciatingly bad I felt like biting my knees with horror.

The compere, Ed Gamble, is a talented and quick improviser, and, although I inwardly groaned when he introduced a story of his visit to the doctor concerning a 'gentleman's problem', it was unexpectedly brilliant on the careful, and probably sanctioned, NHS phrasing that gets used. He was sometimes a touch too bullying in his interactions with the audience (as a German girl sitting next to me commented, he was “very good, but a bit... I don't know the word in English, but in German it would be 'übel'”, which means 'evil' according to my dictionary but I presume she meant something more like 'mean') and I couldn't write about this set and not mention Joey, the primary victim in the front row, whose skewed stomach story that turned out to be an internet self-diagnosis provided ample material for Gamble. I half wondered whether he could have been a plant.

First up was Marc Shalet, who opened with some fairly weak jokes about Avatar, salad reminding him of death and some 'you know you go to Cambridge when...' examples, which sounded rather like posts on novelty Facebook pages minus a Lol Jk or two. The main problem was how artificially it came across, as if he was imitating other people's observations rather than discovering his own. As his set was meant to be naturalistic as far as I could see, it would probably improve a lot if we had been able to get more of a sense of Marc's character. His material towards the end on lonely hearts adverts wasn't bad though, and I enjoyed the letter to the peg-leg Shoreditch hipster. Next was Ben Pope, whose affable stage presence and gentle observational comedy about Christmas with his family in Wales was consistently competent as well as yielding several well-worded gems (it might make me a bad feminist, but his description of Bratz dolls looking like “little whores that have shrunk in the wash” made me laugh). I particularly liked it when he started making a joke about Henry Moore sculptures and then just sort of trailed off.

Third and fourth respectively were Bhargar Narayanan and Pierre Novellie. Bhargar's jokes – mainly pretty tasteless ones with subject matter that covered AIDS, incest, albatross sex, getting freshers addicted to heroin, and a particularly rank one about King Midas and geese - are objectively pants in quotation, but when coupled with Bhargar's cheeky, sweet persona, his set became surreally hilarious. He needed to be more familiar and at ease with his material (though his slow delivery was a nice change of pace) and his constant reference to the notes on his hand was a bit distracting. 'SHUT UP' was his heckle putdown of choice. Easily the set of the night, though, came from Pierre, who has to be one of the select few to have begun a set by quoting from an Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic set text. Nothing was not hilarious, not his bath anecdote, nor his graciously odd reaction to an audience member calling themselves 'a Pierre Novellie afficionado', but most especially good was his questioning of the veracity of adverts for the military (“I thought life would be a series of montages of me turning away from what I was doing to tell people about it!”).

After this peak, Carl Donnelly was a somewhat underwhelming headline act. He lampooned cut-up fruit, bad sandwich choices and discussed the awkwardness of ordering Domino's at two in the afternoon. After an overly drawn out anecdote about taking a photo of himself on the loo to a hairdresser, I was not feeling it at all, but then I had the wonderful realisation that he looked exactly like Rolf Harris would if he were young now, and that kept me happy for the rest of the set. This said, the rest of the audience were audibly loving it, and he had a couple of gags towards the end about being pick-pocketed by dancing Parisians and lost cat poster dilemmas, which won me over slightly more than before.

This is going to sound like a backhanded compliment, but seeing things that the comedians didn't quite get right was an insight into how demanding stand-up is, and how much work and practice needs to go into it for a set to work. And despite some patchy moments, I enjoyed my trip to the college that the compere described as looking like a 1970s mental hospital.