“JUST like your life, only funnier,” boast the ads outside what used to be the Albery Theatre and has now been renamed the Noël Coward.

Well, um, yes, that might be so if a) I lived on the dangling tip of Lower Manhattan and spoke through a large glove-puppet and b) I didn’t laugh twice as much on an average day at home as I did last night at the musical that won Robert Lopez, Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty the Tony Award in 2004.

Extract the puppetry and the best of the songs, and the story is awfully ordinary. An impoverished graduate called Princeton (ha, ha) is trying to find himself and his purpose in life while wasting time in a grotty brownstone on Avenue Q. He hits it off with nice Kate but is briefly waylaid by Lucy the Slut. Meanwhile Rod chucks out his roommate Nicky for thinking he’s a fellow-gay, only to come out of the closet at a denouement I have no compunction in revealing is even happier for all parties than one expected.

But there are puppets and there are songs, and they do much to cover up the sentimentality and predictability. Most performers appear onstage, His Dark Materials style, attached to a puppet, and the person and the attachment act and speak in sync.

Since those attachments mostly have round velvety faces and large, lipless, toothless mouths, the effect is both a rip-off and send-up of the Muppets. When Jon Robyns is playing Princeton, he’s working a cheery, callow-looking puppet with an orange head, and when he’s Rod, his puppet is blue in both mood and hue. Julie Atherton’s Lucy-puppet is a more sexy, bloated and humanoid Miss Piggy.

Here, maybe, is whatever point the evening possesses. These puppets do, say and sing things I don’t recall when I watched their prototypes on TV with my children. They have pretty vigorous, variegated sex. They use words that The Times prints in asterisks. A large hairy puppet called the Trekkie Monster and clearly indebted to the Cookie Monster delivers an ode to porn. It’s mischievous and, frankly, rather juvenile stuff — but then what’s so wrong with that?

Indeed, there’s something almost refreshing in several of the jaunty-sounding songs. Rodgers and Hart never composed a number called It Sucks, referring to people’s unfulfilled lives. You won’t find a song called Everybody’s a Little Bit Racist in the Lerner and Loewe archives or Schadenfreude, which is a jolly salute to the enjoyment of other people’s unhappiness, in Kander and Ebb’s unpublished files.

But to listen to the lyrics themselves is to understand why the show has had so long a run on Broadway. Those looking for something genuinely subversive or politically incorrect will leave the Coward unrewarded.

Actually, I wonder what the great Noël would have thought of his theatre’s christening party. He’d have enjoyed the youth and energy.

He’d have regretted the relative lack of sophistication. He’d have deplored the jokey teddy bears and the cloying tribute to altruism that closes proceedings. Just like me last night.

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