Not many comics can have a punch-line which includes the phrase "a self-defeating two-dimensional continuum", but not many comics have the cerebral qualities of Bill Bailey. A packed Laughter Lounge was treated to something approaching a master class on Saturday night by the British comic who, apart from Eddie Izzard, is probably the best live stand-up around these days.

Taking a good 15 minutes to warm to his task, Bailey, a.k.a. the "Meat Loaf `Stars In Their Eyes' Regional Finalist from 1982", was evidently feeling the effects of a recent Australian tour and, although he never really hit the heights of his spectacular performance at last year's Cat Laughs, he still did enough to prove his immeasurable worth.

Some early forays into metacomedy - plenty of routines ironically based around the "three men walked into a pub" format - were laden with resonance, in particular his unique take on gender comedy where three women walk into a pub, congratulate themselves on colonising a male joke format, but still can't escape the fact that, ultimately, the joke is being told by a man. Maybe you had to be there.

Picking up the guitar, it was music parody time, and Bailey's Chris de Burgh tribute, where "ugly trolls" are consigned to death in de Burgh's new world order, is a powerful piece of work. Moving over to keyboards, he delighted the crowd with his "Cockney music's greatest hits" routine. All of this plus managing to encore with a poem written in the style of Chaucer. It doesn't get much better than this.