When the Footlights smoker was good, it was great. One sketch in particular was brilliantly accomplished; impeccably written and performed. The premise was a meeting of Ben and Jerry – of the famous ice-cream brand – with their two evil German competitors Häagen and Dazs. This one-scene sketch epitomised what comedy does best: it was based on the perfect combination of observation, irony and surrealism. The trajectory was from classic piss-taking of the insistently upbeat strain in American culture, to a brilliantly weird playing on German stereotypes, back to mocking that particularly American form of empty jolliness, but this time capped off with a distinct surreal edge.

Another positive highlight was a stand-up performance ripping into PE teachers. That sounds awfully cliché and vanilla – and indeed most of the jokes were. So it counts as even more of an achievement that – quite simply – it worked. The timing of the punch lines, the changes in the tone and tempo of the performer’s speech throughout, the note of sensitively lived experience behind the comic memories of hideous human beings teaching the miserable excuse for a subject that is PE ... all of these factors added up to make jaded material spring into an uproariously funny and curiously affecting performance.

Indeed, one of the other most notable segments in the show achieved success by the same means of making old jokes funny through subtly clever devices. In this case, it was a classic joke about eating poo and drinking wee. Maybe it’s because in several respects I have the sense of humour of an eight year old that I found that hilarious. But judging by the howls of laughter emanating from all sections of the audience, it is evident that the idiosyncratic narrative forms of those scenes – combined with the nuanced use of varying facial expressions by the actors throughout – made what could have been just cheap and childish into two scenes that possibly inveigled their way into the same ballpark as the sophisticated, at the same time as just being plain funny. 

The Footlights further displayed their commensurate skill in a sketch about the astronaut Tim Peake. (As an aside, I never really got the fascination with him. He’s just some bloke in space. That was soooo 1969.) The brilliance of this sketch lies in the contrast between his claims of grandeur and the tragicomic banality of his reality as a man twenty years down the line whose sole claim to the extraordinary was a spell of time in the past in which he lived in the big nowhere above the stratosphere. (Of course, in real life, Tim Peake will quite probably be living a perfectly content existence in an archetypally bourgeois way twenty years down the line – but that, again, is beside the point.) When Peake’s friends inform him that he is in Basildon, and after a flawlessly timed pause with a flawlessly executed look on his face, he exclaims ‘SPACE BASILDON!’, the audience roared with laughter at the combination of the faux-majesty of his delusion that he is still floating in the humongous expanse of space and the grim realism of the inimitably named Essex new town Basildon.

So after all this enthusiasm, why only 4 stars instead of 5? Amidst the aforementioned bravura performances, I was shocked at just how traj a couple of the segments were. In particular, a game of ‘duck duck goose’ in which there was no goose – it was about as funny as the average skirting board. Also, I’m not naming names at all in this piece, but there was one stand-up early on who supplied jokes on the level of those found in Christmas crackers – and it wasn’t even funny ironic not-funny.

But that said, if it had just been the Ben and Jerries meets Häagen and Dazs sketch – or equally, Tim Peake twenty years down the line on its own – I’d still have deemed the Footlights Smoker worth paying good money to see.