When is a comedian not funny? Dawn French has spent so much of her life making audiences laugh that her debut as a one-woman performer requires some recalibration. The next-door smile is as big as ever, and the eagerness to be liked, so the early section – about the thieving march of time – looks and sounds like a stand-up routine that isn’t quite landing. Laughs are thin on the ground. It’s only about 20 minutes in, as she tells of her early childhood on an Air Force base in Yorkshire, that her intentions begin swimming into proper focus.

It may seem strange to begin a review of a comedy gig with a description of the Tube journey home. But it was noticeable that the crowds who left the O2 Arena in London after Michael McIntyre's new show Happy & Glorious weren't talking about it. About the weather, the full train, what they were up to at the weekend, yes; but his show, no.

Alan Carr has titled his latest live show Yap, Yap, Yap! Because, he says as the show opens, everyone has too much to say these days, much of it - such as the stuff on Twitter - not worth listening to. Coming from the host of Channel 4 chatshow Chatty Man, that's comically rich. But such is Carr's genuine likeability that the audience overlook that and settle in to enjoy the evening.

Sam Simmons' new show – for which he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award last month and the Barry award at Melbourne earlier this year – is titled Spaghetti for Breakfast, but could easily be called “Things That Shit Me”; the phrase pops up repeatedly on a recorded loop, as the Australian comic runs through the large number of things that annoy him.

The hour-long show is the surrealist comedian's most personal yet; among the wonderfully silly clowning, the comic delivers painfully honest anecdotes about his childhood, which help explain “why I turned out this weird”.

Kevin Bridges, although only 28, has been performing comedy for 10 years. Strange to relate then, that he still gets rattled by hecklers (even friendly ones telling him he's awesome – “Relax, it's not a One Direction concert”) and that this otherwise excellent gig descended into acrimony with Bridges leaving the stage at the end clearly irritated.

Kieran Hodgson, Voodoo Rooms ★★★★

When Kieran Hodgson was growing up in West Yorkshire in the early years of the century, he was obsessed with two things – cycling and Lance Armstrong, then the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.

Joseph Morpurgo, Pleasance Courtyard *****