hank you all so much for coming out,” is how Prince Abdi greets us at the top of his set. If only it were so! I’m watching from my daughter’s bedroom, Felicity Ward is joking about the clothes horse in her background and Mo Omar shows us the spilled talc on his bedroom floor. None of us are out, but we all wish we were – in Leicester, say, for the first night of Britain’s second-biggest comedy festival. The east Midlands, though, is out of bounds for anyone not already in the east Midlands. So here we are in the Zoom room for First Night Funnies, the standup cabaret that launches this year’s event, a live-streamed festival featuring 300 performances from more than 100 comedians. It probably offers a fair crosssection, of acts on form, acts not quite firing and acts still pining, I’d imagine, for real-world standup to in-person audiences. And who can blame them? Tony Law’s set endures a false start when the Canadian is heckled by the echo of his own voice. When the next act, Jen Ives, is haunted by the same ghost in the machine, she freezes on screen – then vanishes. Both wrest back decent sets from the gremlins, although Law’s gentle waffle about Neanderthals, the Khmer Rouge and comedians’ existential crisis under lockdown feels like the work of a man unconvinced by his new medium. Ives, meanwhile, plays the provocateur with amoral gags about plastic straws and nostalgia for that pre-Covid era when we all hated old people. Ward, at the top of the bill, is out to ruffle feathers too, with a masterclass in “fingering” for any aspiring lotharios. Her set is the night’s most pointed – ironically, given that this new mum claims to be suffering from addled “baby brain”. Omar delivers a cheerful but patchy 10 minutes that even he admits barely coalesces into comedy, while host Sikisa holds it all together, with the ebullient personality, and occasionally the jokes, to make Zoom standup sing. Let three weeks of comedy commence!