This Smoker had some weak moments; and curiously enough they tended to be the more Frankie Boyle-ish ones. Jokes about bestiality, paedophilia, disability, rape, mental health institutions, and so on, got a lukewarm response, as did routines relying a bit too hopefully on swear words. What did get laughs was physical comedy. The ADC audience giggled like toddlers at a repeated joke about Luigi from Super Mario going off on one side of the stage and instantly coming on (played by another actor) on the other. There was a nice sketch about two pedestrians who find it impossible to walk past each other without feinting the same way, and Theo Chester pulled off an unsettlingly convincing mime of a dog pawing at an unopened tin of food.

John Gallagher, who opened the show, was a good example of the comic who instantly has the audience on his side: firstly by having an attractive Irish accent, secondly by having a few jokes which aren’t about the impassable cultural chasm that, you know, separates the Irish from the English, and thirdly by being impossible not to like. As he navigated through his first gag – a deliberately stilted jibe at David Cameron – the lights went out, and at just the wrong moment. The audience tensed for a second. Then we heard Gallagher's indefatigable yell from the darkness: ‘Tories in the lighting box!’

What made the show was the acting rather than the writing. Emma Sidi delivered a virtuoso and incoherent monologue. Best of all, George Potts as an Italian ice cream boss firing an employee was brilliantly relentless, oscillating with greater and greater speed between charming and unhinged. Poor Lowell Belfield, who had to play the employee, corpsed twice, and then Potts struggled to avoid laughing himself. I could happily have watched him for another hour.

One of the longer, and most successful, items was performed by Alex Owen and Joe Bannister. Their sketch was a combination of two tropes: the scene where one friend reveals to another how much they dislike them, and the mocking of early-middle-aged backslapping lameness – ‘All aboard the good ship banter!’ I don’t know why this kind of character is so often parodied. Maybe it’s a male fear of getting older. In your thirties you panic about hair loss; in your twenties you worry about using the word ‘banter’ without irony.

Owen and Bannister kept their nerve all the way through, so that when Owen’s character realised his rejection I was genuinely, if very marginally, moved, until I remembered I watching a Footlights smoker. The corner of Owen’s mouth twitched, a sign that the character had already recovered. But someone in the audience, who thought he was cracking up, shouted indignantly: ‘You’re ruining the pathos!’ Which is – if you are ever stuck for one – a perfect definition of irony.