With Jo Brand pulling out ill hours before the opening, the organisers of the Laughter Lounge had to scurry around looking for a replacement and were fortunate that a Perrier Award winning comedian, Navan man Dylan Moran, was in town.
First nights are always notoriously difficult to judge, populated as they are by people who have more important things to do than watch the acts, but the first act, Dubliner Mark Doherty won over even the most hardened with a delightfully surreal set.
We've said it before and we'll say it again: Doherty is a star in the making, possessing an ability to traverse areas not normally associated with stand-up and bringing to his performance a faux style of bewilderment which suits the material perfectly. Remember the name, he's going to be huge.
He was followed by English comic Miles Crawford, who delivered a more mainstream type of set - variety being the spice of any comedy club and all of that. The mad, bad and dangerous to know, Malcolm Hardee of the Up The Creek Club in London, kept the momentum going with a bawdy and aggressive type set which suited the mood of the evening.
It was Dylan Moran's first Irish gig in a long time and thus he had plenty of new material to play with. Displaying a much sharper focus than before, he hit home hard with some astute observations about the faultline between the genders and a show-stopping routine about the peculiar hairstyle of the average Irish politician. It was the small, seemingly throwaway, observations that elevated his set to something approaching memorable.
Like the best comics, Moran works because he succeeds in presenting his material via a series of images, each more resonant than the last.
A good start to a good club - now the real work begins.
