ENERGETIC stand-up comedian Chris Addison topped the bill in the cosy basement bar last night, with a whistle-stop tour of the birth of civilisation, taking satirical swipes at the Daily Mail, Rupert Murdoch, speeding motorists, Euro-sceptics and TV's Time Team.

His Stone Age sketch about the birth of human language was hilarious - an inspired variation on the timeless battle-of-the-sexes theme.

His acerbic colleague, Natalie Haynes, was less mobile on stage - due to a trapped nerve in her neck - yet her material still packed plenty of punch.

She celebrated her Belgian roots by presenting a prima facie case that the Smurfs, in their pointed white hats, resembled members of the Ku Klux Klan.

She produced large colour photographs of the blue cartoon characters, created by the Belgian Pierre (Peyo) Culliford, to support her argument that the Smurfs had a white supremacist agenda. There was even an image of a sneering red-eyed black Smurf locked inside a cage.

Haynes also used her razor-sharp tongue to condemn litigious parents who used the courts to get compensation for the Alder Hey Hospital human body parts scandal.

She argued with passion that putting a price on the life of a child does not bring that child back from the dead.

Dealing with an inebriated heckler, Haynes could not resist mentioning her infamous sexual liaison with a sixth-former she taught at a public school. She told the heckler: "I used to teach people like you until I got fired for... (expletive deleted) one."

One shudders to think how much more scary this comic psycho babe would have been had she not been suffering from a pain in the neck.

Updated: 09:32 Friday, June 11, 2004