IN the comedy game, anyone is fair game. Jimmy Carr, king of the 'I wish I'd said that' brigade, gave an assured display to an audience of amused cynics.

Carr's knack of elegantly constructed puns and word

play, peppered with expletives for kudos, and his cool demeanour worked a treat. Arch was an apt description of his style, gags emphasised by nothing more than a raised eyebrow. Straddling the, at best, ill-defined

line between offensive and alternative - Carr revels in his bad taste persona. Consequently, there was a guilty pleasure in much of the laughter. The stream of jokes were amusing, but not side splitting - funny clever, not funny hilarious.

Carr was arguably too smart for his own good, certainly a fair bit smarter than some of the witless

comments from the crowd. Hecklers were put down with

wilful ease; situations that showed Carr at his best.

When a member of the audience chastised him for not remembering him from a previous show, his response was simply to pause, launch a devastating riposte, then return to the unfortunate Dutch couple who made the mistake of changing seats at the interval.

The show lacked structure, and tended to list under the weight of comments from the crowd. Carr's stage image was of a middle-class white guy in a suit. The targets, and there were many - from gay men, fat people, gipsies, the disabled, and foreigners - played strongly to our sense of superiority. Definitely a class act - but Carr could so easily become like the Davidsons and Chubby Browns he so openly distains.

Updated: 12:09 Monday, November 22, 2004