If tonight was anything to go by, Benjamin Crellin will be finishing the 2009 Comedy Festival season at full gallop. Tonight’s performance of Apocalypse Soon! (cute title) was just a canter, but that’s not a fatal criticism.

Although the show, was – uncharacteristically, if one pays heed to Crellin’s typically positive reviews – plagued by nerves and the odd awkward silence, in Apocalypse Soon! Crellin shows real comedic talent and an edginess that extends a little further than most (Crellin, for instance, didn’t leave his “special forces” joke just at exposition, but took it to its full, palsied, logical extreme, spasticity and all – think of the “if I’d just said no” TAC advertisements from a decade ago – and as I think we all know, guilty laughter is the best laughter).

But the show’s kinks were visible from the beginning, though they weren’t all Crellin’s fault: only five minutes in and a couple headed for the doorway. The show was thoughtful and erudite, with apocalyptic topics ranging from the obvious (religion’s bad, y’all) to the obscure (super string theory and the Hadron Collider), and the audience ate it all up. Personally, I’d have liked to see Crellin spend a little more time on the latter – the strange and intellectual – as he clearly has a talent for it. Moreover, Crellin might do well to gain a little confidence in his exposition.

But for the most part, Crellin just needs to tighten his act. When it flowed, he had no trouble keeping the audience in stitches, myself included. But too often the show’s troughs – moments of silence in which he was, perhaps, attempting a sort of mysteriousness – just felt uncomfortable. In all, it ran for around an hour, but with the fat trimmed this show could easily be a rollocking 45 minutes.

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