You've no business here

THEY tried and failed: the comedy management/agent/promoter heads were out in force at this year's Murphy's Cat Laughs determined, by dint of mobile phone and 10 page faxes, to bring a corporate edge to the festival. In a sense, it is a compliment that the backroom money people are now in on the act . .. anyway, all attempts to turn Cat Laughs into the business schmoozefest that is Montreal and Edinburgh were resisted.

Kilkenny excels itself because it puts a premium on topclass standups who are able to go about their work safe in the knowledge that they don't have to do auditions for television producers or impress some promotions company. This year's laugh fest attracted 80 comics from all around the world, who performed in 14 different venues, but the "fringe element is still very much to the fore and that naive yet noble sentiment of "let's make it up as we go along" that characterised the first festival in 1995, still rings true despite the fact that Kilkenny is still coming to terms with being called "the comedy capital of the world" (at least every June bank holiday weekend) and that there is already a waiting list among the performers for next year's festival.

So, the message from this year's Cat Laughs was quite clear: let's not do lunch.

With no obvious big name act to hang the festival around - "the Bill Murray factor" - audiences had to work a bit harder on the "will we or won't we" front and ironically it was the "never heard of him/her" names who stole this year's show. From a large theatre to a back room of a pub and on to a marquee, there was all manner of differing comedic expression in the venues. Thrill to the gangsta rap crack cocaine stories here! Swoon to the nice cup of tea" Anglo Saxon narratives there! Delight to the bizarre, surreal, deadpan, improve somewhere else!

The two names who emerged victorious from this year's festival and who were carried shoulder high through the streets by a grateful populace last night (or maybe not) were Harland Williams and Mark Steel with the mad, bad and evidently very dangerous to know Laura Kightlinger running them a close third.

The fact that Williams, a Canadian, and Steel, who is English, represent two diametrically opposed ends of the comedy spectrum, the biggest laugh was that they were both performing at the same festival.

Williams divided the audiences into two bitterly opposed camps - "he's a genius" and "oh no, he's not - he just makes it up as he goes along". This was always going to be the dilemma with a performer who makes Eddie Izzard look like Bernard Manning. Williams is, quite simply, off the comedy map and in a sense he makes the idea of criticism redundant. Either you go with him to those very strange places in his head or you get up and leave. If you want it in a soundbite: he's the Canadian Vic Reeves with added strangeness.

Coming down from that and running over to see Mark Steel gives you a severe case of the comedy bends. Steel is that smart bloke down the pub who keeps you riveted all night long with his softly spoken tales of anything that comes into his head. There is nothing desperately intricate about what he does, but he does succeed in bringing you down a familiar street, stopping only to point out things you never noticed.

Laura Kightlinger looks and talks like a comedy "babe" but she is in fact quite deliciously evil with her material. The old complaint that comediennes spend too much of their act concentrating on gags about tampons or about how bad men are in bed does not apply here - you get the feeling Kightlinger's reaction to having a bad lover in bed with her might simply be to kill him. Her routine about autoerotic asphyxiation provoked a few gasps of horror from the audience but no matter that's the price you pay for being brilliant. The contrast between her slightly airheady delivery and her extraordinarily wicked narratives, heightened the tension even further. Put her on our television screens now.

There was more, so much more: Emo Phillips stormed his gigs, Sean Lock was in everyone's top five, Owen O'Neill brought a tear to the eye with his poignant one man show and Alan Davies played the nouveau bloke to perfection.

On the Irish front, Barry Murphy and Kevin Gildea excelled themselves while The Comedy Cellar took no prisoners, especially when Joe Rooney and Paul Tylak demonstrated that they are a two man Irish version of The Fast Show. Karl McDermott, whose radio sitcom on Radio 4, The Mahaffy's, begins tomorrow night, was at the peak of form and won the poem of the festival award for a little ditty simultaneously offensive to fans of Dana and the Pope, while another young man with a reason to celebrate, Bob Reilly (he won £1,000 on Saturday night in some obscure comedy talent competition) set out his stall with aplomb.

And there were the films: descended from the same line as John T. Davis's Shellshock Rock, Olive Robinson's documentary on Dublin's Comedy Cellar venue was, in a word, marvellous - which obviously means RTE won't be screening it and Mark Staunton premiered his first full length feature, Separation Anxiety, which will be coming to a cinema near you in a few months.

So basically it was all fab and groovy and the sun shone all the time and all of that. Next stop: Edinburgh.