It’s Not Me, It’s Revue plays a big card early as its house lights dim. Flickering onscreen, Michael Palin hoves into view, face inches from camera, welcoming us in and recounting his own memories and mishaps from his time with the Oxford Revue decades prior. While it’s sweet, and a clear indicator that when it comes to their forebears, the current crop have done their homework, it’s a tad rambling and somewhat outstays its welcome. With the greatest respect to the commitment of its performers, I’m sorry to say I ended up feeling similarly about a few of the sketches too.

Rhythm is so important to get right when it comes to a good sketch, and it’s not like the pieces never fall into place here. One of my favourites of the night, a surreal tour of the stately manor of Lord Daventry of Coventry, has more than a hint of A Bit of Fry and Laurie in its absurdist repartee, tongue-twister wordplay and tartly matter-of-fact delivery from Adam Pickard. This was a set-up that understood its pace, a steady but sure build-up of gags that propelled us towards the punchline. Similarly, Martha Davey elevates an amusingly aggro, if not hugely original, gym commercial with a hilarious rapid-fire delivery of their increasingly bizarre iterations of yoga that could easily be a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song.

The troupe is at its best when the sketches feel proportional to the gag at its centre. This shone through particularly in the recurring interstitials peppered across the evening, such as Pickard’s everyday trials and tribulations as the chronically sexy protagonist of Right Said Fred’s ‘Too Sexy’, or Leo Bevan’s pedantic partner that can’t stop overanalysing every compliment their beleaguered beau tries to spring on them (“you’re like a primrose!” “I’m used to commemorate the death of Benjamin Disraeli?”). They’re short, sweet and get exactly the time devoted to them they need.

Other sketches fare less well in this respect, especially when we get into the longer form stuff. It feels like the writing process involved finding a play on words and working outwards, often resulting in several minutes of set-up for a punchline that doesn’t warrant it, like wearing a shirt several sizes too big. Their Noah’s Ark bit waffles around a few Christmas-cracker-grade animal puns that build no momentum and includes clunky cultural references that raise more questions than laughs; how does a pig get access to Anastasia Beverly Hills highlighter in the Old Testament? A skit involving a football commentator who has never learned his colleague’s name in twelve years hits its payoff (his nametag reads John Lewis and his colleague thought he worked at the shop part-time - stop, my sides, how they split) and then just keeps going, petering to a halt as one of the commentators grumbles “fuck it” in a way that feels like the sketch just giving up on itself. This isn’t helped by the fact that many of the sketches were dependent on sound cues that faltered a little on arrival.

There are good lines in here (see Kit Renshaw and Kat Jennings’ warring couple in a pantomime horse: “You drove me to drink!” “I led you to water!!”), but too often the sketches arrive at their main premise too early and then lampshade it rather than escalating it, leaving things feeling a little deflated. When an incompetent attorney tries to build a case around their defendant being hot a la Luigi Mangione, culminating in a Tiktok video set to Britney Spears’ Criminal, why not expand on their fecklessness and include actual photos of him committing the crime in the mix? Or take a ‘key party’ where, instead of the usual activities, the host melts down the keys in a microwave for the guests to drink with straws - cut there, that’s great! It’s fun, incongruous and subverts our expectations. You don’t need, as this sketch includes, a guy to say “wait, I thought we were going to have sex,” and spending the remainder of the runtime figuring out how he’ll get home - it’s a hat on a hat, and drags out the premise past what it’s giving.

But I think my main gripe is, though some of the sketches do land, It’s Not Me It’s Revue didn’t offer me much I hadn’t seen before. It’s great that the Oxford Revue recognises their heritage, but I want to see them build upon it. We’re in a really exciting time for sketch comedy culturally; acts like Chris Fleming, Aunty Donna or Characters Welcome taking the bones of fairly conventional set-ups and pushing the art form in new directions, playing with tension, silence, surrealism and audience discomfort. With that in mind, as the young new faces of the Oxford student comedy vanguard, I want to see the Oxford Revue push the boat out a bit further from the safety of broad gags, Blind Dates spoofs and punnery and get a little bolder and weirder with it - and know when to edit, edit, edit in the process.