"On no circumstances should you use your kitten as emergency snow tyres."

First act of the night tonight, making his XS Malarkey debut, was Tony Richardson.

Tony opened up with his penguin gag, then immediately followed it up with a gag about losing his virginity to his uncle (which brought a few groans from the crowd). He also had some nice material about fashion students but the highlight for me was his 'System Of A Down' joke - beautiful. Tony had quite an energetic, fiesty stage presence with plenty of confidence which got the night off to a rather good start.

Second onto the stage was young whippersnapper Andy Watson.

Andy is relatively new to the scene (ahh! I remember his first gig at the Comedy Balloon) but has come on quite a bit in terms of material. Andy's comedy is quite physical with plenty of sound effects, but it used to be at the expense of punchlines ("less noises, more gags" I believe I said to him once). However, he's a fairly fast learner and has written more material (and more still since this night, by the time this review was written). He got a pretty decent response from the crowd, so no complaints there, but I think he should drop the 'hen party on the tram' routine as it's simply too loud and doesn't have a strong enough payoff. Other than that, pretty good stuff.

Next up was an act who's played Malarkey's a few times before, Louis Martin.

Drama teacher Louis pretty much did his 'standard' set, which is no bad thing as it's solid and gets laughs, but he also tried a bit of banter, with varying degrees of success (there was a cracking line about drink driving in combine harvesters - not sure where that came from!) There were a few cheesy puns in there but they got laughs. He went off on the occasional tangent and got sidetracked a bit but I think it made things a bit more entertaining than a word-for-word, highly polished set. He went down well with the crowd on the whole.

After the break came a real Malarkey old-schooler - Jason 'Entertainment' Cooke.

Jason opened up with a barrage of puns and short musical bursts ("You lookin' for trouble? Try Moss Side at night.") and then regailed some Universal Truths on the audience, including a new bit about not having a shit since Friday and developing Chalfonts as a result of over-exertion. Old favourites were in the set, including Morrissey singing the Bob The Builder theme, and Fred Elliot getting stabbed in the next ("I say, stabbed in the neck!"). Overall he got a great response from the crowd, largely due to his rapid-fire barrage of gags - it doesn't matter if a gag doesn't work, there'll be another one to follow it up pretty much straight away. Top stuff from Jase.

Headliner of the night was the ever popular shiny child himself, Dan Nightingale.

For a bit of a giggle, Lee played the theme tune from the Old Spice adverts when Dan went on and Toby did a big showbiz introduction - much to Dan's confusion (but with hilarious consequences). Dan did what dan does best tonight - banter, although he did manage to mix bits of material in tonight (he did plenty of stuff of Geordies and Newcastle, for some reason). Needless to say he stormed it with the crowd, but we'd expect no less from Dan.

Spider.