Duncan Campbell on Cabaret in Los Angeles

There have not been many occasions when I have laughed so much I cried. Seeing Spike Milligan in Son of Oblomov in London's West End some long ago night in the last century is one of them. And I've always been impressed by those mythical critics who could say of a show - "I laughed, I cried." In fact, I have always had more in common with the man in the Charles Adams cartoons who sits watching a sad film with a smile on his face while all around him weep.

So it was odd to find myself in a Hollywood club one Sunday evening a couple of years ago with tears of laughter running down my face. The show was called The Un-Cabaret and the place was Luna Park where they had been performing every Sunday night, bar Oscars and earthquakes, for the previous seven years.

The Un-Cabaret consist of two New Yorkers, Beth Lapides and Greg Miller, performance artists who came out here more than 10 years ago and stayed. ("The terrible thing about LA," said Orson Welles once, "is that you sit down, you're 25 and when you get up you're 62.")

Anyway, thank God they did stay. They developed a show that eschewed the normal comedy routines of jokes and punch lines for a different format. They normally have three or four guests - comedians, writers, actors - whose instructions are just to tell the audience what has been happening to them recently. As they do so, Beth Lapides sits out of sight with an open mike and when the performer seems to be veering from the point she interrupts in cheerfully snappy fashion.

Some of the performers use the occasion to work on new material, some just discuss a telephone conversation they have had with their mother about a film they have both seen. Some like Tim Bagley, whom I saw in their latest show, may start by asking people to turn off their mobile phones. Leaving them on, he said, was "like going to the bathroom - number two - and not wiping yourself."

As the performances are as much to do with tone and timing as what is said, it's hard to reproduce what happens with the written word, but I have yet to take an unsatisfied customer along.

Much nonsense has been written about whether, post September 11, comedy in the United States could ever be the same again and whether or not 'irony' was dead. When you catch some of the Un-Cab regulars like Bagley, Taylor Negron, Julie Sweeney or Mike McDonald (who told one joke that is simply not repeatable, even on a website) you will discover that life goes on. Website-reader, I laughed, I cried.

There is a chance to see them, if you are in LA, at the Knitting Factory on Thursday, May 23, 7:30, 7021 Hollywood Blvd. Call 323-463-0204 for reservations.