Well, did you have a laugh then? Two and a half weeks of unrelenting merriment, 350 shows at 40 venues; it's enough to turn you into Jack Dee. But there are signs that Glasgow's event, now in its fifth year, is beginning to get a grip on a city that, historically, has had a job generating a festival atmosphere for anything.

Comedy always had a better chance since everyone in Glasgow thinks they are at least as funny as Billy Connolly. The local boy Frankie Boyle really is at least as funny as Billy Connolly and with a sharper edge to boot. Having allowed himself some television exposure recently, this has been his year, requiring the organisers to add two additional gigs at the cavernous Academy venue.

But alongside the big names, the festival does reach out to those comedians on the fringes with shows such as Stand Up for Glasgow at Platform, the new cultural oasis in the wastelands of Easterhouse. And guess what? People in Easterhouse laugh just like everybody else. They laughed slightly more at John Gillick, a kind of second-string Fred MacAulay, but only because Parrot, the other name on the bill, and the compere Susan Calman, had warmed them up. Gillick's line about Lidl being “not so much a supermarket, more a bring and buy sale” struck a local chord.

The other thing just about everyone in Glasgow believes they are an expert in is football. Combine football and comedy and you're, well, laughing. Tam Cowan and Stuart Cosgrove have been doing that for a decade with their BBC Radio Scotland football phone-in Off the Ball.

Off the Bawl, as they call their rare forays into the live arena, lacks the nutcases who ring in for the guys to riff off. But quite a lot of it depends not on football at all but just sharp contemporary wisecracks. Occasionally they combine the two, as with the news that Berti Vogts, the hapless former manager of Scotland, has been hired to manage the Rwandan national team, As Cowan put it, “Have they poor bastards not suffered enough?”

I don't think those two suffer much for their art, but Keir McAllister has if his play Death of a Critic, revisiting the pain all performers feel from bad reviews, is anything to go by. An irresistible title for me, and I hope I'm not spoiling McAllister's fun, and that of his four stand-up performers, by saying I thought it was rather good.

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