Well, isn’t this nice? For his second London appearance, after his Soho Theatre stint in 2004, the taboo-nuking American comic David Cross has brought some friends. And with his three fellow New York oddballs, plus a new Limey ringer each night of the run, he’s turned this Oxford Street basement into an East Village comedy wingding. But it doesn’t quite catch fire.

Playing to a wide, awkward room, they don’t always sustain the collusive atmosphere needed to sell some wild, awkward material. But the jackpots outweigh the lemons.

The gentle Brooklynite Kristen Schaal, the best excuse to use the word “kooky” since the heyday of Rita Rudner, has several unlikely routines a tweak away from brilliance. Eugene Mirman, looking like a young Sylvester Stallone with a cheesecake habit, gives a sometimes stumbling, sometimes wondrous tour of his smoking psyche. Both end with brilliant video spoofs more fully realised than their stage routines.

Cross holds the evening together. Best known over here as the scene-stealing Tobias in the sitcom Arrested Development, he is a stand-up comedian who can mix pissiness, vulgarity and intellectual superiority in a manner that nobody should try at home. But this bunch of animal stories (his new dog, some gay flamingoes) and throwaway outrage is too casual to show him in his best light. Endearingly abrasive as he is, he’s coasting here.

Still, these are all performers endearingly at ease with their peculiarity – you can see why the night’s incongruously dapper ringer Jimmy Carr should declare them “four of my favourite acts in the world”.

So all hail Cross for bringing us this affable yet experimental night: “a variety show without much variety”. But it’s the slickest slacker, the laconic, lascivious Todd Barry, who is the night’s surest bet. Dubious, self-contained, announcing that “this place kind of tests my hygiene issues”, he makes you feel that you’ve never seen anyone quite like this before – and that you’ve known him for ages. Somehow, only American comedians can mix outright weirdness with rata-tat professionalism in quite this way.

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