GALE force winds battered York over the weekend. And it was time to batten down the hatches as a joke-propelled twister swirled straight towards the City Screen last night.

First to be flung through the door at Force Nine speed was dapper weirdo Anthony J Brown, bizarrely dubbed the Leonard Cohen of comedy.

Chillingly stroking and caressing his microphone throughout, Brown delivered an imperiously deadpan set surreally dominated by eerie silence.

But to suggest Brown went down like a balloon jam-packed with leaden weights would be entirely misleading.

The man was marvellous, nonchalantly building to crescendos with the fine-tuned trickery of an old master.

With dead slow delivery, dysfunctional Brown poked fun at Doncaster's state-of-the-art Ceefax cafes, and recalled being booted out of Robot Wars - for wrapping his Rottweiler dog in tin foil. After the exuberant high jinks of Geordie middleman Warren Speed, headliner Roger Monkhouse promptly entered the venue in an oversized coat, stole the show and left without even attempting to obtain a receipt.

Pint in hand and clearly mining most of his set from a troublesome mid-life crisis, Monkhouse crammed his act with cynically observant jibes about life, love and the War on Terror.

Monkhouse was first rate - a man truly at ease with both material, audience and alcohol - the latest in a long line of comic tornadoes to have swept through a City Screen Sunday, leaving a devastating trail of laughter in its wake.

Updated: 09:33 Monday, March 22, 2004