Lounge Room Confabulators ****

Imagine that Tim Burton, or some other great modern-day storyteller of your choice, knocks at your door and asks if he can come into your living room for an hour to tell some fantastical stories. You would get some beers in and friends around pronto, right? Well, the Lounge Room Confabulators, a duo from Australia who tell stories in the Burton style of weird and dark, do just that – turn up on your doorstep and then perform in your front room, your garden or your office, wherever you have space for 10 or more people.

Margaret Cho, Assembly ****

Margaret Cho is back, and how. Ten years away from the Fringe, the American-Korean bisexual - “I'm just greedy, I guess” - is a little softer around the edges maybe, but still as funny. With her lefty humour, punctuated by lots of adult content, she is waspish, but definitely not Waspish.

The Monster in the Hall, Traverse ****

David Greig's indie comedy musical, first performed at Glasgow's Citizens Theatre at the end of last year, is a bright and inventive four-hander about a 16-year-old girl struggling to keep everything together. Duck Macatarsney (Gemma McElhinny), who writes escapist stories in her room, cares for her biker dad, known as Duke, who suffers from multiple sclerosis. At the beginning of the play Duke (Keith Macpherson) is struck blind.

The award-winning Australian comedian Sam Simmons is shuffling around in a pair of bread loaves. He's wearing them like slippers and trying to take bites out of them at the same time. Indeed, his tremendously silly show, Fail, is essentially a shambles. This is the overarching joke: it's his absurd non-sequiturs and his tongue-in-cheek, shamateur performance style that reduce his audience to spasms of laughter.

It must be the beautiful British weather that has attracted a bunch of American comics to UK shores recently. Just before Las Vegas legend Rita Rudner starts a short season at the Leicester Square Theatre in London and hot on the heels of his Curb Your Enthusiasm sometime colleague Jerry Seinfeld (who recently did one night at the O2 in Greenwich and of whom more later) comes Jeff Garlin. He plays “fat fuck” Jeff, Larry David’s agent in the HBO sitcom, which, I’m delighted to report, returns in a new season on the BBC later this summer.

Jerry Seinfeld, acclaimed New York stand-up and star of the eponymous American sitcom co-created with Larry David, last performed in the UK 13 years ago. He’s currently doing a brief European tour and, while keen fans were quick to snap up tickets at the O2 in London, there were noticeably bare areas in the vast arena last night. Lots of British comics have managed to sell out the O2 (some repeatedly), but those unsold seats should come as no surprise; ticket prices started at £75 and went up to an astronomical £300, so the burning question must be - was he worth it?

It’s been more than two and a half years since the third series of Jack Dee’s comedy about a comedian. Everyone in Rick Spleen's world looks a little bit older, a mite more pinched and drawn, as if proximity to the man about the house is draining the blood out of its occupants. Time has not at all been kind to Rick himself (but then, when was it ever?). His temples are awash with grey, his skin is sallow with failure, and his self-important delusions seem ever more steeped in bitterness and malignity. I for one have missed him dreadfully.

Even if you are not of an age to have watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus or Fawlty Towers when they were first broadcast by the BBC, you will have heard of John Cleese. And if you are remotely a fan of comedy, you will hold Cleese in high regard as he is a writer, performer and actor of great talent, and this show, an overview of his life and career, proves it beyond argument.

You don’t see much ventriloquism these days. It’s a comedy form mostly associated with variety and Victorian music hall - although it goes back at least to the Greeks - and gives a lot of people the heebie-jeebies. I know several people who can’t watch Michael Redgrave’s chilling performance as the unbalanced ventriloquist Maxwell Frere, who believes his dummy is alive, in the 1945 Ealing horror film Dead of Night. And it’s Psych 1.01 to appreciate there may be some serious emotional issues in performers who can express themselves only through an inanimate doll - the words “multiple”, “personality” and “disorder” spring to mind.

Many of you will know Ed Byrne from his appearances on BBC shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You, where his sardonic take on current affairs marks him out as a sharp-tongued and quick-witted comic. Now he’s touring with a new show, Crowd Pleaser, which I saw at the Anvil in Basingstoke; like his previous live work, it’s another well-constructed evening of smart observational comedy.