A fair few thousand pounds will have been raised in Oxford on Saturday night when five of the country’s top stand-up comedians turned out for Sumatran orangutans (not a phrase often used and thus especially welcome). Marcus Brigstocke last week in these pages described to me the deforestation dilemma being faced, and the aims of this fundraiser were expertly, and humorously, described on the night by a representative of the UN’s Great Ape Survival Project. Indeed, numerous apes around the New Theatre held collecting buckets throughout the near four hours of high-quality entertainment.

It was a relief that Messrs. Brigstocke, Lucy Porter, Stewart Lee and Josie Long – loosely corralled by MC Daniel Kitson (pictured) – did not pontificate much about the night’s cause. Audience members knew what they had paid for and where their money was going to go; but there’s no doubt that they wanted to catch up on the latest material from these headline acts.

Lucy Porter was a delight with her “I’m getting older, while still single” act, interspersed (why not?) with suggestive readings from a guidebook to Bangkok and an assault on Jim Davidson. Her frenetic charm perfectly set off the laid back qualities of the second act, Stewart Lee (of Lee and Herring TV fame, but with his own BBC2 vehicle coming up in March). Quizzical, laconic and up-to-date: his “warm, nostalgic feelings” for Woolworth’s, MFI and Zavvi were extremely funny.

Josie Long is a relatively new kid on the block and worked hard for us; but someone who imagines philosopher John Locke playing Deal Or No Deal, a way to account for missing husbands during the Second World War, by way of an extended jest about Hieronymous Bosch, has much going for her. Marcus Brigstocke closed, with an almost perfect routine of middle-class, shambolic angst. He loathes Londoners, cares about Obama and tells a great Halloween tale.

But Kitson was the true star: ripping into a poet in the second row of the stalls, extolling the virtues of a zoo-keeper nearby, hurling Fairtrade chocolate into the farthest recesses of the theatre, swearing with abandon – but cleverly – and holding everything together admirable. Can the words sharp and distrait be used in the same sentence to describe an act? If so, Kitson’s was it.