Andrew O'Neill

The essential premise of Andrew O'Neill's 2007 Festival act is, if you'll bear with me, that the entire world is in the imagination of a five year-old boy called David who has a brain tumour and has started conversing regularly with the Universe, who is a man with a dodgy American accent looking to get into a spot of stand-up. Ok, then. Of course, all that nonsense is just a mildly unnecessary excuse to pad out O'Neill's slice of zany comedy which cannot avoid the unfortunate comparisons with the inevitably zanier Ross Noble.

It's a decent routine however, and O'Neill's bizarre outbursts on microwaving monkeys and songs about his favourite dinosaurs – I won't ruin it, but suffice to say it's not the infinitely superior Diplodocus – are undeniably amusing. More grating, however, is O'Neill's material on veganism (he likes it) and religion (he doesn't like it) which border on the preachy, while the hallucinations of David and the stand-up appearance of the Universe fail to hit the spot. Worse still are the attempts at Madeleine McCann jokes – while openly doing the rounds in pubs they still seem unnecessarily controversial when done on stage. And this proves the major flaw in O'Neill's comedy – whether it's his random outbursts, his risqué jokes or his political rants, they're all being done somewhere else, just a little bit better.