Katherine Ryan was making her West End debut – a big moment in any comic’s career – but she made her entrance on stage at the Garrick unannounced. Yet if the opening to Glitter Room was strangely underwhelming, it wasn’t long before the Canadian’s trademark waspish style was to the fore and the sass kicked in.

When the League of Gentlemen – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, plus non-performing writer Jeremy Dyson – reformed for an excellent series to update us on events in Royston Vasey (“portal to another world, or just a shit hole?”) for the BBC last year, they enjoyed it so much that they announced a tour for 2018, their first live show since late 2005.

As we enter the venue, Rose Matafeo is playing a game of mini table tennis with a member of the audience. Nothing that follows seems to relate to this “just a bit of fun to start the show” – but, trust me, it's one of the cleverest bits of misdirection you will ever see. The penny drops only at the end of Horndog, for which the New Zealander deservedly won the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award for best show at the Fringe at the weekend.

Rosie Jones ★★★★

There are two versions of Rosie Jones, she tells us; one nice, one not so nice. And who knows which of those would have won the battle of psyches if the comic had not been deprived of oxygen for a quarter of an hour during birth, she asks in Fifteen Minutes. It's a terrific device – subtle but pointed, witty but poignant – as she muses about what kind of person she might have been without cerebral palsy.

Luisa Omielan ★★★★

Ari Shaffir ★★★★★

Alex Edelman ★★★★★

When Alex Edelman first appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014 he walked off with the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer. Now in his third stand-up show, Just For Us, he delivers a beautifully constructed hour of narrative comedy.

Catherine Bohart ★★★★

Catherine Bohart tells us at the top of the show that she is the bisexual daughter of an Irish Catholic deacon, which is, when you consider it, a niche description. Oh, and she has OCD. That’s quite an introduction, and she more than lives up to it in this debut show, Immaculate.

When Flight of the Conchords first played at the Edinburgh Fringe they were a sleeper hit, championed by other comics and loved by critics. In 2003 they were nominated for best show in the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, a Radio Two series followed, then two series of an HBO mockumentary in which they played fictionalised versions of themselves as innocents abroad trying to make it in New York, with fellow Kiwi Rhys Darby as their manager (pictured below).

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The Hospital Club’s annual h Club100 awards celebrate the most influential and innovative people working in the UK’s creative industries, with nominations from the worlds of film and fashion, art, advertising, theatre, music, television and more. For the second year running they are teaming up with theartsdesk – the home of online arts journalism in the UK – to launch a hunt for young talent.