Reginald D Hunter:Even confined to a 20-minute set, most comedians tend to deliver identical routines at every sitting. Which is why, having enjoyed the Georgia, US stand-up's bullet breezy delivery as the last act in the 6pm slot, you might have sighed to discover him first on the bill at 8.45pm. Here we go again.
But Hunter went on to perform a completely different and still funnier set - where no joke, segue, and perhaps even noun was repeated - making him not only one of the funniest comics on the bill, but easily the most generous.
His warm and faux naive persona, all blinking eyes and straight-faced delivery, presents someone determined to give us the right answer, but his material can be savage - from an unrepeatable theory on how Clinton could have gotten away with the Monica Lewinsky affair, to a sneaking appreciation for the best break-up line ever voiced ("No matter how hard I try I don't see you in any of my dreams"), Hunter is one of the most stealthily devastating American comedians around.
Shappi Khorsandi:"I'm the box-ticker," is how Shappi Khorsandi introduces herself, a young Iranian woman who is currently six months' pregnant. One of innumerable gags that make a creamy mash of several political hot-potatoes, it is also one of the few lines we can quote from this wickedly funny comedian. Khorsandi, who grew up in London, is by her own admission more Blue Peter than street, but that slightly mumsy ability to mercilessly patronise hecklers or employ a girlish enthusiasm to explain the difference between Iraq and Iran - "we're the ones with the weapons of mass destruction" - then idly wonder about having a less hardline president for her birth country, such as "a Mullah Lite", is as devastating as it is disarming.
Many comics took on race this year:Reginald D Hunter head-on, Dara O Briain with jovial absurdity, and Khorsandi with a rug-pulling irony. "It's not racist," she says after an unquestionably racist joke, "because I'm beige." Touché.
Frankie Boyle:If Billy Connolly has given us the archetype of a Scottish comedian, with a highland fling of bouncing and rolling cadences, the Glaswegian Frankie Boyle, most familiar from BBC's Mock the Week, smashes it completely.
Performing his set with a long slow drag of a voice, he is a master of sardonic, uncomfortable wit. Boyle knows that comedy thrives on taboo; the more raw the nerve, the more he jabs at it; the sicker the subject, the harder the laughs.
Opening and closing on two paedophile jokes of seriously poor taste, for instance, he is the only comic I have ever seen make an audience shout out, "No, no, no, no." Actually, that was in response to easily his most controversial line: "That's all from me." Although there is a nastiness in Boyle's material, it operates on a level of irony that makes misanthropy seem like a compelling, necessary release.
Mark Watson:He sounds rather Welsh, doesn't he? But how far should we trust this gifted Bristol-born, Cambridge-educated comic who sounds suspiciously less Welsh in several TV appearances? Whether or not he switches his persona on and off at will, there is something winning about his boyish energy - you like him immediately - that makes Watson's shaggy-dog stories, riddled with fizzing digressions and awkward asides, attain the momentum of a runaway train.
Actually, a lot of his material involves trains, such as an unwanted gay pick-up attempt in a station: "I thought, well, maybe I could have sex with him - not that I'd enjoy it - but it would get us out of a socially awkward situation." Still, there's something oddly detached about anyone whose eyes are set about two feet higher than the audience's gaze or the confectionary nostalgia for Wispa Gold which - like David O'Doherty's plans for a Tetris-inspired stage show or Jason Byrne's riff on fancy paper - becomes disconcerting. You may recognise these areas of 1980s arcana, but that means there will come a time when the minutiae of pop culture will elude you. And that's going to hurt.
THE IRISH CONTINGENT
"He's not like he is on the telly," cries Neil Delamerein a panicked impersonation of a terrified audience member. As broadcasting restrictions fall like scales from our eyes, no television camera could accurately capture the lightning speed of Delamere's wit. But at a time when everyone has some sort of television project going on, Irish comics now seem to be in tough competition with their own screen personas. That's why it's rather relieving to hear comics tease Des Bishopmercilessly as a magnet for documentary cameras. And why it's a little distressing that Bishop's new routine is based mainly around his new documentary.
Andrew Maxwell, of RTÉ's The Panel, simultaneously trashes his broadcaster as "chickenshit c**ts", then glorifies the supposed stand-off it has allowed him to have with Bertie Ahern, whom he called a motherf**er on air, and whose political career has somehow weathered Maxwell's attack.
Maeve Higginsis funny scatty, Jason Byrneis funny unpredictable, David O'Dohertyis funny endearing, and Tommy Tiernan, as ever, is funny peculiar.
