We were all laughing as soon as Jonny Pelham walked out on stage (being, as he attests, clinically ugly). Considering the highly structured approach of his routine, there is a real darkness at the heart of his material that sets him apart from the familiar middle-of-the-road comedy clique. He does employ ‘I think that too!’ observational comedy, but it’s about that moment of existential dread you have upon waking every day and disappointingly realising you’re still alive. Pitching himself as the outsider in a set addressing disability, drugs, and social exile might sound overly familiar, but there’s definitely enough of a fresh tangent here to make him one to watch.

When Mark Silcox took to the stage, I didn’t believe that the person in front of me realised what he was about to do. In the spotlight stood a bespectacled middle-aged Indian man who had both the appearance and delivery of a jaded academic of analytical chemistry (because, as he went on to explain, that’s what he actually is). His voice sounds like an early attempt at text-to-speech software that’s bored of its own existence. Thus, the energy and pace of Silcox’s set – which examined banalities such as having precociously mastered ‘print preview’ in 1995 – progressed to that of a glacier, unsurprisingly being met with baffled silence by the vast majority of the audience. But I couldn’t stop laughing. It was so ridiculous, and so different from anything I’ve ever seen before, that I definitely consider him the most interesting act of the evening for me. His biggest laugh came in dispatching a heckler simply by raising his hand and professorially requiring that nobody interrupt his ‘lesson’. Genius. It must be said that his comedy is decidedly niche, exemplified by the fact that at one point during his act a perplexed woman sat in front of me turned around to see what I was laughing at.

The final act of the evening, Peter White, instantly won the room back with a return to the kind of stuff you might actually think of as ‘comedy’, in that he actually appeared to have written jokes. In contrast to Silcox’s hushed set, there wasn’t a moment’s silence during the Canadian’s shout-y twenty minutes. It was reasonably easy going, e.g. straight men being frightened of ‘sneaky bum ninjas’, black guys having large penises etc. He was, in fairness, derailed somewhat by some particularly annoying and persistent hecklers that ended up cutting out a lot of his material, which he did handle well. A favourite in the making, undoubtedly, but the likes of which we’ve seen before.