'Sunlight is the enemy of comedy', squawked Jack Barry, as he sweated profusely minutes before the show was due to start. This was a preview show where you get to be the test cases for a comedian's fresh material. It’s a great way of seeing good comedy very cheaply, and also the unpolished workings of how they work and mould bad jokes into good jokes.

Having established that people had travelled as far as Kennington (this can only be funny in an Oxford audience) to see the show, we began. Jack is the face of McCoy crisps (he's appeared in their TV advertising campaign) and he recounted a very funny anecdote about trying to cash in on this fame for free bags of crisps. This show promised to be about how he is his parents’ therapist but we only briefly touched upon this topic. Barry revealed that he wanted to do observational comedy but in doing so realised that his observations were unrelatable for his audience. At present, the hour-long show is mainly about sex and religion and how he did religious education every day for 15 years and has never needed it, but only did sex education for two weeks and has needed it loads since then. Barry did interact with the audience well although he did say himself that with such a tiny audience (we all had to move to the front as there was only about ten of us) it makes it harder to run certain material past them.

The ending was a bit awkward, in fact quite like a slightly regrettable sexual encounter as he finished with, 'Thank you. You’ve been very useful.' The comedy fringe organisers did offer to let us stay on for the next act, Jenny Collier, if we wanted but it was just so hot in there that I’m amazed to say I declined. I’m sure it was good but it is very hard to perform in those conditions.