You’ve probably heard of the eponymous Ken Cheng in one skin or another. He’s the guerilla prankster who fooled us all with his chess-playing alter ego, Mark Liu.  Now he’s treading the comedy boards as his slicker self. But in last night’s reprisal of his Edinburgh show, Cheng wasn’t alone: joining him were a crop of Cambridge’s finest comedians who, with their congenial turns, stoked an ironic crescendo towards the night’s headlining act.

Siân Docksey opened the night as compere, instantly negotiating an audience-artist rapport which lasted throughout. From jokes on her Armenian heritage, to serial anecdotes on her fated, yet prolific, love life, Docksey commanded her material expertly, with disarming, wide-eyed candor. Her musical interludes were positively Minchin-esque, showing a formidable knack for comic rhyme: her lyrics on a ‘vegetable and receptacle’ truly inspired. Yet the first act proper was Ian Samson, the chirpy Scot, who delivered some quite brilliant homilies on dating in the digital age, his Winnie the Pooh moment perhaps the best of the night. Aside from perverting childhood nostalgia, Samson’s winsome, self-deprecating charm won the audience over; his material, whilst student-geared, was never safe.

But it was Zoë Tomalin’s set that really was the revelation of the night. Tomalin’s geek-chic appearance alone is a visual feast, all zany prints and lolloping limbs: a Technicolour Bambi. And her material doesn’t disappoint. In a brilliant paralliptical feat, Tomalin claimed to have swept feminist polemic under the "proverbial rug", only for it to cut, razor-sharp, through all her musings. There is real, erudite edge to her work, but she is never too clever – mixing surrealist insight with jaunty observational humour. Her take on the Pantone colour-chart led a to brilliant excursion on "popcorn sadomasochism" and "50 shades of cereal". Even my plus one, fond of his blokeish, everyman comedy, was in stitches over her "metaphysical foodstuffs" drawing. The Nietszchean "Mario and Pickles" and Moomin of Oblivion were amongst other particular standouts. The more I watched her, agog, the more I felt Tomalin a natural successor to Footlighter alumnus Alex Owen: rigidly stylistic, confident, relentlessly goofing up her intellectual roots.

To match such a considered performance would be hard, yet Cheng changed tack altogether with a wry reworking of tired masculine memes. His stage presence is almost bemusing – shuffling on with nervy coyness, only to complacently serve up jokes on racism and genocide. Surprisingly, Cheng bagged most laughs when at his most innocuous  – his linguistic analysis was exceptional – but it’s the awkwardly provocative he clearly relishes. "Minority Switcheroo" was funny, but his YouPorn skit and "dialogue to Penis" were simply smutty clichés. Rather than hammering the same trope of masculine isolation, Cheng could have done turning his hand to some more anecdotal, expletive-free humour  - with his same trademark effrontery.

Cheng’s skittish persona is a consummate, sitcomic creation – even reading out an almanac he would make us laugh.  I only wish he could believe in this self-sufficiency a little more.  I certainly did.