On casual inspection, mainstream stand-up comedy can seem the preserve of graduates from the better public schools discussing the hilariously vexing non-availability of hummus in their local delicatessen.

A skein of resistance to this tendency, however, runs lividly through the Glasgow International Comedy Festival programme, thereby providing, to paraphrase The League of Gentlemen, local jokes for local people. Forty years ago most of this would have been the stuff of variety and vaudeville, little turns of comedy in character à la Francie and Josie, the characters being comic grotesques familiar from the audience’s daily lives. None of it would have made much sense to anyone raised, say, under a different local authority.

Variety, though, is long gone so the stereotypes have been obliged to swell out and fill an entire evening’s slot. Hence, for instance, the existence of Bob Doolally, whose show Straight from the Bawbag is at Blackfriars Basement on March 21. The creation of the comic Paul Sneddon, Doolally is the distilled essence of and a satire on television football punditry, part Denis Law, part Craig Brown; the embodiment of the blathering, semi-articulate types who see reality as a series of groin injuries.

Neds are big at this year’s festival. They’re the Scottish character-comedy stereotype de nos jours. There’s Bratchpiece Family Values (The Arches, March 13), in which comic Mark Bratchpiece (Motherwell’s Woody Allen, it says here) portrays an entire family, including Asbo-in-waiting the Wee Man. Or there’s Planet of the Eejits, Scottish comedy veteran Stu Who’s musings on neds, chavs and pikeys (Maggie Mays, March 20). John Ross brings Return of the West End Ned to the Buff Club (March 21) and The Wee Man receives the honour of his own solo show, Nedolution (Blackfriars Basement, March 29).

THE BIG HITTERS

Sometimes you desire comedy that retunes your way of seeing the world. And sometimes you just fancy seeing somebody off the television. Those of the latter persuasion can rest assured there’s a decent smattering of the well-kent faces occupying the bigger venues at the festival.

It’s nice to know some can still fit live performance around their panel-game and DVD-plugging commitments. Speaking of which, the comedy world hasn’t yet quite forgiven Jimmy Carr for gifting copies of his latest release to Princes William and Harry at a charity function several years back. Carr (Clyde Auditorium, March 18 and 27-29) is very much something of a Marmite comedian, loved and loathed in equal measure. His jokes have the satisfying clunk of well-engineered machinery, hinged around a uniquely cruel brand of whimsy (“I was asked to judge Mr Gay UK. I said it would be my pleasure: he’s against nature, he’s against God and he’s going to hell.”) Yet they also have a kind of smug, home- counties callousness.

Rob Brydon (Royal Concert Hall, March 12 and 14) is a gentler proposition, just as clever but with wit that’s in service of his downbeat loser schtick, as seen in such television productions as Marion and Geoff and Gavin & Stacey. As with most Welsh comedians, Brydon has just one subject — what it’s like being Welsh — but he has defined it.

North of Anglesey, meanwhile, Ed Byrne (Kings Theatre, Monday March 23) should mop up the student constituency as the emeritus comic of cheerful Irish pedantry, a style pioneered by Ardal O’Hanlon, the Father Ted star who arrives at the same venue two nights later.

In a more impressionistic vein there’s the verbally incontinent surrealist Ross Noble, who gibbers his way through his show Things at the Theatre Royal from March 20-22, and panel-game emperor Paul Merton, who brings his Impro Chums to the Kings Theatre on March 28. Suggest they do a skit in the style of Woody Allen in Motherwell and see how they handle it.

COMEDY OUT OF CONTEXT

As comedy is increasingly quarantined in purpose-built, chain comedy venues such as Jongleurs or The Comedy Club, so it seems to increase the urge to experience it further abroad. A range of the festival’s shows seek to move comedy away from the checked table-cloth and waitress service of the conventional club and re-site it somewhere funny-peculiar rather than funny-ha-ha.

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