Something exceptional for the festive season this, with Sara Pascoe warming up for her 2025 tour with some December dates, accompanied by her husband, Australian sketch-improvisor comic Steen Raskopoulos, plus a changing line-up of headline acts in their own right. On the Edinburgh night, Phil Wang and Garrett Millerick completed the ensemble, with the evening hosted by Jen Brister.

There’s a lot to be said for knowing your audience. And Brister identified this one as skewing older and exhausted, simply coming out tonight a big commitment. World-weary and simmeringly furious at her children, she set a tone of love-hate for one’s offspring that was echoed in Pascoe’s closing set, while essentially suggesting that everyone here was escaping their family before the festivities. Such mild misanthropy was exaggerated to blustering effect by Millerick, whose baleful, apocalyptic grumblings see no good in humanity whatsoever, the end of days imminent. His melodramatic flourishes and bleakly lyrical writing kept his set entertaining, the horror cartoonish.

Wang, in the opening spot, devoted much of his stage time to silly observations about his recently acquired moustache. Yet similarly, he also opined upon clashes between mutually antagonistic generations, indulging in a bit of nostalgia for his 90s youth. And though his writing was typically tight and wryly funny, with the compere and two of the other comics covering similar ground, it meant the show lacked diversity, the cumulative gallows humour sometimes tipping too far towards grimness.

Happily then, right in the middle of all this jaded cynicism, Raskopoulos was an absolute palate cleanser, somehow making his sketch vignettes about child abandonment the lightest fare of the show, delightfully woven around the quirky observations of his Greek-orthodox priest film-reviewer character. With economy and verve he balanced weirdness, musicality and audience participation, before ultimately drawing the disparate threads together with a satisfying circularity. Closing, Pascoe, with two young children now, is in pure survival mode, her mental health on a knife edge, being brutally honest about her mother, husband and progeny. For such an established, arguably mainstream act, she’s gloriously indiscreet and paints a wonderfully vivid picture of her home life turned upside down that bodes well for her solo shows next year.

Live At Christmas is on tour until Saturday 21 December; reviewed at Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh.