‘This gig is on!" yelled Russell Howard as he loped on stage 50 minutes after the audience had filled the Playhouse.

(The arithmetic is simple, by the way: 8pm announced start, followed by a just-adequate 20-minute intro from one Stephen Hall and then a long break before the main act — note to management: give the audience what they want!) Howard has burst through into the toughest of environs in the last two years — helped immeasurably by his appearances on BBC 2’s Mock The Week. In that show, he has to hold his own against five other comedians, not to mention towering chairman Dara O’Brien.

On a tour like this, he sinks or swims alone and I can report that he crests the waves more than adequately. He’s brash, he’s enthusiastic, he moves lithely, he swears justifiably, he targets accurately, he’s still only 28. Howard never let up over 75 minutes. The performance is very physical and he delivers his material at an exhausting speed and with a machine-gun precision that makes scribbling quotes in darkened stalls a challenge. He called on us to kill Mugabe, cursed the day he first heard the singer Enya and had fun with the many wrinkles in the face of Gordon Ramsay.

He tilted predictably at Sarah Palin, shared a nice memory of being with John Cleese in an Egyptian gym and told many, many jokes about sex.

I enjoyed his reference to Stephen Fry — "Being with him is like hanging out with Google" — and understood his purely descriptive take on images of Buddha as "looking like as if he could rock up to your house delivering pizzas".

There was a refreshing absence of attacks on current politicians (barring a nudge at the Lib Dems) and a cleverly phrased jibe at someone formerly linked with the murder of Jill Dando that presumably broke no rules.

He took a risk by asking for "any questions" from the audience in his closing sequence — it didn’t really work, apart from an efficiently swift end when he discovered that he was chatting to someone who declared herself as "Emma — still at school"!

The audience, I should point out, was ecstatic throughout — the average age was early-to-mid twenties and I guess there were a few more girls there than boys.

Russell Howard is as sharp as a knife right now, and will surely trade up to venues larger than the Playhouse. He deserves to, and will, succeed. There’s a rage there, and a feeling that he could play the perennial angry student forever. But what do people like him aim at after they are 30?