With comedy acts trailing across the festival, the "comedy weekend" banner may seem like over-enthusiastic packaging. Certainly, one dent in its optimism was the sudden cancellation of Armando Ianucci (called away to do last minute re-edits on I'm Alan Partridge), but while Arthur Smith and David Benson drew very small crowds, both Dylan Moran and Julian Clary "bunged" (in the word of festival director Robert Agnew) the Arts Theatre and the Whitla Hall, respectively.
It was a pity for Arthur Smith (who also took over Ianucci's advertised comedy writing workshop) because, with his flungaway routines about early morning DJs and "whatever happened to white dogshit?", he's actually a very funny man. It was all the funnier that, with his short set, delivered in a heavily smoked-in Sid James look and voice (a quality he acknowledged to some hilarity) - and the inexplicable appearance of a young Belfast disco-dancer, while Smith wandered off for a silly-costume change - that, frankly, he didn't give a damn.
It was an equally small but older crowd that turned out to worship at the simulacrum of Kenneth Williams, the late great comic whose nostrils and vocal inflections penetrate deep into sections of the brain associated with potty training. But David Benson's Think No Evil Of Us. . . My Life With Kenneth Williams, as a rather actorly one-man play, was rather mismatched among the other stand-up acts. Consisting of some fond autobiography cut with rambling routines in a manageable likeness of Williams, it culminated in the sad suicide of the latter, and a rather schmaltzy good-night. Only so-so.
The well-attended Comedy Bill in the Whitla Hall was a more enriching evening of pure badmindedness. MC-ed by the campy-wampy Graham Norton (although occasionally irritating, he put across some master-probes into the polite Belfast crowd), it all led towards Bill Bailey's headline act. With his Glastonbury routines, ageing hippie appearance and dope gags, he might have resulted from the mating of a human egg with a nipple cell from Fat Freddy's cat. But he could make the place fall asunder when he was on a roll, with his comic bug-eyes and effortless musical mimicry on guitar and synthesiser. Although some of his targets (Doctor Who, Starsky And Hutch, The Clangers, 1970s Tolkieny prog rock) were a bit dated - even nostalgic - other routines (like the plight of a session xylophonist) were a right howl.
With his support act, Tommy Tiernan played a blinder, getting great verve and timing behind his elegantly written material (I'm still chuckling at the characterisation of the male pudenda as "a small unconscious monkey"; and the routine about the Navan sneer). Mind you Tommy Tiernan has some funny ideas about sex - but then again, that's what he's paid for.
