"What are you expecting from The Dark Show?" asked Kevin Gildea, compere of the first of two events where off-colour material was the only thing on the menu. This was a good question, to which nobody had a satisfactory answer: it's hard to be offended when the distasteful gags have been officially sanctioned.
Gildea, alive to the paradox, went through a checklist of taboos and risqué material. "What do I think of paedophilia?" he asked with over-played daring, "What do I think of religion? What do I think of the Muslim issue?" These were all designed, it seemed, to deflate expectations rather than stoke them, and even Gildea quickly climbed down from the last question when he discovered a row of unoffended Muslims sitting before him.
Greg Fleet, too, discovered that dark comedy isn't so much a matter of giving offence, but finding people who take it. His laugh lines carried a satirical swipe at observational comedy: "You know when you kill a prostitute and you're running away and you get that mix of terror and excitement? What's that about?!" But his most controversial material, of all things, involved having once performed a joke about shark attacks, only to find a couple in the front row heaving with sobs. Screw it, he thought, they're in the minority, and kept going. How a comedian evaluates the sensitivities of a crowd seemed like the darkest suggestion of the evening.
Wearing a heart on a pendant - a full sized medical replica, mind - Carol Tobin's material was less dark than borderline psychotic. Resembling an underfed model, Tobin cuts an incongruous figure, her attractiveness balanced with a slow dragging delivery that makes her deadpan descriptions stealthily disturbing. Laugh? I'm nearly curled into the foetal position and imagining a happy place.
That just gives Gildea a chance to sprightly announce, "Now it's necrophilia's turn!", although the attendance becomes steadily less keen to plum the nether regions of the soul, more content to settle for a well-turned gag. Thank the dark lord for Rich Hall's country and western alter-ego Otis Lee Crenshaw then, who barely modifies his musical act to suit the occasion and is all the better for it. His ballad about informing a loved one of her weight issues by means of Irish place names is still a scream: "So Portadown that Tubbercurry baby,/ Because you ain't looking Trim." And his hilariously queasy ode to childhood, Show Me Where He Touched You on The Doll, proves beyond a doubt that the devil still has the best tunes. And some of the better gags too.
