Organised in aid of humanitarian support efforts, charismatic comedian Sami Stone’s show for a good cause drew an impressively strong line-up to the tightly packed top of a pub.

Vladimir McTavish might have compared himself unfavourably to Phillip Schofield, Rod Stewart and Billy Idol, but his bleak, serrated send-ups of Scotland repeatedly hit the mark.

Ben Thurston and Phil Jerrod’s gentle appearances led to two markedly different sets – Thurston’s full of sleep-deprived good humour about the drags of fatherhood, Jerrod’s a series of eloquent diatribes on modern life – before Trine Munk squeaked and cooed her way through a bizarre and brilliant parody of a pained Nordic singer-songwriter.

Any lasting eardrum damage was soothed by the distinctly indie voice of Josie Long, using the headliner slot to trial new material and confess a gory tale of some poorly-timed sex with a former boyfriend.

Pick-and-mix storytelling suited Long’s quick-thinking anecdotalism, and she seized on the lack of cohesion to throw in tales of 19th-century writer Walt Whitman and Cait Reilly, the young graduate who won an important employment law case against the government and turned out to be a fan of Long’s work.