While Wimbledon concluded on Sunday, the Hyena Lounge served a pair of stand-up aces: Jim Smallman and Alun Cochrane.

Smallman’s Tattooligan show confounds lazy preconceptions about his heavily-decorated body. With a projector’s aid, he exhibits his bountiful ink, reassuring his audience he is normal. Just with a Pacman ghost and Nike trainer adorning his skin.

A natural comedian, Smallman immediately holds a stage confidently, speaks with loquacious fluency and linguistic agility and has plenty of grimace-worthy prurient anecdotes.

He successfully juggled the trivial with the deeply personal (if sometimes mawkish): from his laconic ire about the misuse of “random” and his fight with a goose, to discussing his alcoholism and morbidly comical suicide attempt. This ex-English teacher should not be judged by his tattoos, but his ability to captivate an audience with ease.

“I thrive on the insignificant” was Cochrane’s apposite statement. He is a misanthrope whose hackles are raised by heavy breathers and a fridge that beeps when left open, but he spins a yarn with such amiability and wry, self-effacing wit that life’s minutiae become breathless flights of fancy in his comedy repertoire.

His playfully vivid observations about toilet designs, an awkward advertising display with 14 life-size cut-outs of Alan Titchmarsh and his jubilant shock when someone asked for three sugars in their tea complement his saga of buying and selling a house and his uproarious “grown-up advice” including the wise aphorism: play to the strengths of a café. With their joyfully uplifting comedy, it is game, set and match to Smallman and Cochrane.

Jim Smallman and Alun Cochrane, Edinburgh Fringe Preview, Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, Basement, City Screen, York.