Comedy at the theatre-cum-very-dark-room that is the Corpus Playroom is risky: the space is so intimate (I think the technical term is ‘poky’) that if the jokes are good, the audience and comic are the best of chums, engaged in a lighthearted, drawing room repartee. If the jokes are bad, however, one can find oneself in a situation that resembles an awkward conversation.

Pierre Novellie got this fragile audience-comic relationship off on the right foot as compère. Engaging an audience in conversation is tricky, and Novellie dealt well with some flat responses. His affable, Yogi Bear manner and anecdotal humour didn’t just make the audience laugh, but want to hug him. You might not have guessed that this unassuming presence is in fact Vice-President of the Footlights.

First up for the slaughter was John Bailey: a petite, tight-mouthed young man, Bailey’s aggression was pitched just slightly too high to feel comfortable. I quite roundly disliked him: his material was at times fumbled, often dweeby (a joke about binary provoked an audible sigh), and his crack about killing African children, plainly unfunny. What pushed me into full-on loathing, however, was his dig at reviewers: if comics are astronauts, he vituperated, reviewers are people watching a rocket launch. The only problem being that Bailey’s rocket never left the ground.

Mercifully, the comedy rapidly picked up after this shambolic nadir: Ali Lewis, a self-professed shortarse, gave a relevant, understated set; Nathan Gower, a wickedly dark primary school pastiche. Ben Pope, with his foppish hair and anxious eyes, was Liam Williams in the making, and showcased a great comic vocabulary (I particularly enjoyed ‘fucklump’); but my favourite act by far was the formidable Ken Cheng, whose wry, pragmatic brand of comedy produced floods (and, in my case, actual tears) of laughter. My only hang-up was that a couple of his jokes were slightly too male-oriented, and left only half the room laughing.

The acts were a mixed bag, and there was sometimes a sigh of relief when Novellie returned to the stage. In fact, the host stole the show, and Novellie’s chortled responses to his comics’ jokes were often funnier than the original material.Ultimately, although the show wasn’t side-splitting, it was certainly rib-tickling, and held together by a superb compère.