Breaking out from its usual Tufnell Park Comedy Club surroundings, this comedy revue could easily have been forgiven for freezing up under the spotlights of the much larger UCL Bloomsbury venue.

It is to the credit of the eclectic group of performers, then, that that never happened.

Opening proceedings was maniacal compere Dan Atkinson, a scruffy overgrown teenager of a man in clothes four sizes too large and a week’s worth of beard. With his nervous, rapid-fire energy he looked like he’d just been turfed out of bed by his mother and force-fed instant coffee.

Comically he was excellent - in particular his theory that the reason IVF treatment is so expensive is that only rich people have trouble conceiving, so the sole idea is to take your money off you until you’re broke enough to fire out squalling sprogs on the 393 bus to Hackney - but his main role was to get the audience suitably primed between acts, and his megawatt energy output was exactly right for that job.

First of the acts proper was Milton Jones, a somewhat old-school purveyor of surrealist one-liners. It makes a nice change, in this age of freewheeling comic anecdotes and contrived personas, to find a comic who is prepared to just... tell... jokes. And it is particularly enjoyable when the stand-up in question looks like the forgotten love child of Boris Johnson and Leonard Rossiter.

The unpredictable leaps from topic to topic were often bewildering, and your reviewer found himself desperately trying to cling to whatever twigs of sense came floating past in the torrent of non-sequiturs, but frequently Jones would land somewhere so unexpected and original that it would take your brain a few seconds to work out why your mouth was laughing.

Middle-class terrorists (“Balsamic Jihad”) and his stricken sister (“She’s quite ill, I’m afraid. Hayfever, and now diabetes. I took her some things to cheer her up - you know, flowers, chocolates...”) came floating past on the stream of consciousness, while a baffled but delighted audience tried to keep up.

The next three acts - Will Smith, Will Hodgson and “Ivan Brackenbury” - were all solid comics, although it might have been a bit unfair to sandwich them between Milton Jones and the headline act.

Will Smith (“not that one - still, at least it’s less embarrassing than that business at the MOBO Awards”) had a studiedly white, upper-middle-class Old Etonian persona, apologising for swearing and describing his abject terror in the presence of society’s lower echelons. Hodgson meanwhile was a podgy, pink-haired punk from the West Country, sexually ambiguous yet breast-fixated, while Ivan Brackenbury ran a “Hospital Radio Roadshow” from the Bloomsbury stage.

All three had excellent gags - particularly Brackenbury, whose Timmy Mallett persona and line in inappropriate songs led to some marvellous set-pieces. One can’t help but wonder about these caricature-comics, though, just how far they can stretch their material. They obviously aren’t one-trick ponies, but it would be nice to see a few more tricks nonetheless.

Of course, the man we’d all been waiting for was Ed Byrne. Readers will hardly need to be told that he’s quite good.

After accurately pointing out that using Stansted Airport makes you look like a pikey, and bemoaning the tendency of nine-year-old girls to wear the word “Gorgeous” across the arse of their tracksuits (“But she was a minger!”), he settled in to a lengthy discussion of his upcoming marriage.

Of course all of this is quite familiar territory - women throw themselves into every detail arranging the Big Day, men don’t care - but Byrne kept it all feeling fresh, largely by skirting close to genuinely bitter territory. Indeed in a lesser man’s hands his acknowledgement that getting married at 35 is always going to have an element of “settling” could have come across as seriously nasty.

He managed to keep it affectionate and even threw in a marvellous virtuoso section about the differences between American, English, and (bizarrely) Scottish porn - it’s the accents that make all the difference.

With his hair cut shorter - almost sensibly - and his acknowledgements that he is taking the first steps up the foothills of middle age, it would be reasonable to expect Byrne to have mellowed out a bit.

It was a relief to discover that he hadn’t. A genuinely gifted comic and a privilege to watch.

Tom Chivers