Susan Calman's latest show has a delightfully silly title – Calman Before the Storm – which neatly doesn't pin her down to any particular theme but instead allows her to riff on a wide range of subjects. It makes for a pleasing hour of feelgood comedy.

This show started life at the Edinburgh Fringe earlier this year, while the Rio Olympics were taking place; but Calman wasn't worried that she might lose potential audiences. She knows her demographic: “Oh, I’d love to go see Susan, but no… the taekwondo is on!”

Romesh Ranganathan has had an astonishing rise in comedy. The former teacher did his first full-length show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013, having made his debut there in 2010 in the newcomer competition, So You Think You're Funny? Now he's a television panel-show regular, and the second series of his travelogue Asian Provocateur is currently on the BBC. His success, he deadpans, is because, with his Sri Lankan heritage and a lazy eye, he ticks not one but two diversity boxes.

You may have thought that the Brexit vote in June would have been manna from heaven for Al Murray as the Pub Landlord, his knucklehead xenophobe creation. But in this uneven and – at two-and-a-half hours – overlong show, the referendum result and what it means for this country is mentioned early on but is hardly the focus of the show.

The last time I saw Alexei Sayle was at a benefit gig in Essex in the Eighties, when his rapid torrents of invective and surreal invention was stand-up as great as I’ve seen. Last night’s stage interview about his memoir, Thatcher Stole My Trousers, was reminiscent of those times rather than comparable.

Truly, the older Julian Clary gets the filthier he becomes. As he warns us in almost the first line of The Joy of Mincing, which celebrates 30 years in the business, “Are you ready for filth?”

He isn’t mis-selling, and the audience at the Congress Theatre in Eastbourne, where I saw the show, loved every naughty minute of it. The combination of the British seaside and ultra-camp comedy from this “renowned homosexual” was a winning one. 

It's striking what a broken heart can do for a comic. Not least it can provide him with some new material, but also make him take a step back to reevaluate what he has. In Marcus Brigstocke's case it led him into a horrible depression but happily, via some other byways, to this new show, Why the Long Face?, which started life at the Edinburgh Fringe last year.

Isy Suttie, an ever-smiling and engaging stand-up, may come across as a real-life version of Dobby, the perpetually nice character she played in Peep Show, but that's somewhat to deceive. While she is an immensely warm comic she used to have, she told us at Winchester Discovery Centre, some very strict rules about choosing a boyfriend; he must be grammatically aware of the difference between your and you're (I have no problem with that, obviously) and, most strikingly, he mustn't like the sea – “It's just water that moves a bit”.

Dave Gorman was probably the first comic to have embraced technology in his stand-up. Albeit, in the early days, it was using 35mm slides, hand-drawn graphs and an overhead projector, but then latterly a computer and the ever-more influential Internet and social media. And so, as is a feature at all his shows, there's a large screen on stage when I see him at the Royal Festival Hall and when he says: “I've put it on a graph” there's a loud cheer of recognition from the audience.

When is a comedian not funny? Dawn French has spent so much of her life making audiences laugh that her debut as a one-woman performer requires some recalibration. The next-door smile is as big as ever, and the eagerness to be liked, so the early section – about the thieving march of time – looks and sounds like a stand-up routine that isn’t quite landing. Laughs are thin on the ground. It’s only about 20 minutes in, as she tells of her early childhood on an Air Force base in Yorkshire, that her intentions begin swimming into proper focus.

It may seem strange to begin a review of a comedy gig with a description of the Tube journey home. But it was noticeable that the crowds who left the O2 Arena in London after Michael McIntyre's new show Happy & Glorious weren't talking about it. About the weather, the full train, what they were up to at the weekend, yes; but his show, no.