Imagine yourself as Daniel Leigh, the main writer of The Canon: A Literary Sketch Show. The Corpus Playroom has, incredibly, allowed you to put on your own sketches in the first week of term. It’s opening night, and a chilling thought enters your mind: what if the jokes suck? What if no-one laughs? There’s a reference in The Canon to the famous TV show of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, a master of his craft, who would be the first to tell you that the golden command of comedy is simple: it has to be funny!

Luckily, Daniel need not worry, because The Canon is a very funny show. It has laughs in plentiful supply. English literature was plundered last night for puns and gags that should have been terrible, but turned out to be hilarious. Crucially, the actors delivering the jokes were consistent in the quality of their performances. Lily Lindon and Catriona Strong were the most versatile among them, and given the large number of female characters in this show, I did wonder whether it would have benefitted from more women in the cast. The standout performer was Daniel himself, especially in the brilliant supervision sketches, which are (I presume) inspired by Fry and Laurie’s parody of a drama workshop. The second of these brought the concept a few insane degrees closer to absurdity: the result was spectacular to watch.

The Canon is by no means perfect: it could do with a bit of trimming here and there. ‘Plath’s Kitchen’ and Virginia Woolf’s meeting with an estate agent were clever in playing with the audience’s anticipations, but there were a few sketches that didn’t do the same, in which everyone worked out the main jokes by the third or fourth line. ‘Bill’ Shakespeare’s stand-up routines were quite funny, but his jokes about writing to get laid were crude and cringe-worthy. (The sketch about the scandalous origins of Frankenstein was a much better take on the same topic.) And the sequencing of sketches could have been better too. In great sketch shows such as A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Monty Python, longer sketches are broken up by interstitials. But in The Canon’s second half, short sketches followed one another in quick succession, necessitating a lot of change-overs. This slowed the pace down, especially when the preceding sketch didn’t get a laugh.

Despite these criticisms, The Canon deserves four stars. Why? Call it the guilty pleasure of an English student if you will, but I was left in stitches by the Dickens sketch, and despite some misses, the quality of Daniel’s show – with additional writing by Lauren Brown – was high, often inventive and original, parts of it better than anything I saw in the Footlights’s ‘Canada’ show. Writing and performances of this standard deserve recognition and praise.