"There's cum on your face, you're a big disgrace..."

Back to form with some spankingly good comedy on Tuesday and a decent crowd to match.

First up onto the shoe box was Malarkey favourite Dominic Woodward trying out some new material.

Some of it was a little bit hit and miss, but for the most part it worked, in particular the stuff Dom's mother says, such as, "Don't go out after dark," to which Dom replies, "After dark it's light!" The bit about canaries - by Dom's admission - didn't really go anywhere, but he managed to recover with some top advice about shoplifting.

Next on was the youthful Adam Cadwell who did his first ever gig at Malarkey's back in February. It was quite a nice surprise to hear all new material from Adam as the stuff he did on his debut was good.

The material was generally sound, but sometimes the punchline needs to be delivered a bit quicker as there's a danger of the audience's attention wandering during some bits. For the most part, though it was good.

After the Rhyl Sun Centre bit Adam unfortunately forgot the rest of his set and had to go off! Aww! And it was going so well! Never mind. Adam's still quite new to the stand-up scene but he's got some good material, clear delivery and looks quite confident. He should go far if he carries on in the same vein (and can remember his set!)

After the break came a debut from London act Steve Williams.

Steve started off an impressive set with a bit of quality audience banter which set a good tone for the rest of the set. His contact lens material was brilliant, largely due to the fact that the bit about searching for lost lenses was absolutely spot on.

But it was the banter with the audience which was the funniest (as it usually is for most comics). All in all an excellent 15-minute open spot and I believe Toby will be having him back in the future.

Next up was the superb Patrick Monahan with lots of material he didn't do last time he was on in early March. Also, he's a master of improvised audience banter - okay, grabbing a mobile phone that was ringing is not exactly new but the conversation with the bloke's mum was hilarious!

But what a bastard shame that the microphone cut out twice during the set. However, Patrick just got on with his set as if nothing happened - in fact, I'm not sure he even knew it had even cut out! Must invest in a monitor for the comics some time. Toby came to the rescue, however, a fixed things by attempting to sneak on stage behind him and fiddle with the cable. Seemed to do the trick though.

Toby was back on stage a bit later, along with a bloke from the audience, to do an impromptu version of We Will Rock You, complete with comedy moustaches (see pic). An when I say "impromptu" I mean the on-the-spot lyrics by the threesome were truly apalling but hysterical.

After that came 'guess the impression' with Patrick's attempts at Geri Halliwell, Craig David and Abraham Lincoln doing karaoke (!). The big finale was a Postman Pat routine, complete with stuffed cat. Quality.

I think Toby will have him back as a headliner next time.

After Patrick's fantastic set I thought the headliner was going to have a difficult time making the audience laugh as it seemed they'd gone into comedy overload, but I was glad to be proved wrong.

Jamie Mathieson was that headliner, and I feared the worse when he started off with a well-used wanking joke, but from then on it was much better.

Jamie told the audience of some of his slightly more unusual perversions, such as women in yashmaks (the middle-eastern clothing that women wear with the letterbox for the eyes) for the reason that they're the exact opposite of readers' wives with the anonymity strip across the eyes. Hmm. Never thought of it like that myself.

His style reminded me of Dave Williams a bit, which is no bad thing. Plenty of observations of real life, and a healthy spurt of rudeness. Not exactly the most original choices of topics for gags, but the gags themselves were good.

Altogether, one of the best Malarkeys in the last few weeks, if not months, for consistency.

Man of the Match: Patrick Monahan.

See you next week!

Spider.