Scott Edgar, Simon Hall and Steven Gates may be celebrating their twentieth anniversary as Tripod this year, but the bingo spinner full of numbered balls which was used to select the set list (and which Scod named the “balls of death”) ensured that this show was anything but old hat for both the audience and the band. Tripod’s 2016 MICF show, 101 Hits, revolves around their songbook of the same name. This unorthodox planning method results in a beautifully mismatched tapestry of delightfully disturbing comedy, beginning with their majestic ode to Dungeons and Dragons, and cavorting all the way down two hours to their twang-tastic ‘Second Drawer Down’ (spoiler: they discover that only most things can fit in the second drawer down). In between, we are treated to excerpts from some of their previous Comedy Festival shows, including Dawn of Time from Tripod Versus the Dragon, (in which Scod, Yon and Gatesy re-enacted the shadow puppet introduction using only their own limbs) and Ghost Ship and Building an Enid from Tripod Tells the Tale of Tosswinkle the Pirate. The boys charmed and perturbed at each turn, going from a rendition of ‘One More Amazing Couple’ (in which they sang about an irritating couple moving to the suburbs and closing the local pubs down in such close harmony that half the audience forgot they were listening to comedy), to the adorable ‘Hot Dog Man’, a song about lovely old hot dog vendor who uses his hot dog van for slightly less lovely purposes after dark. The band’s repartee (and by repartee I mean the pauses in every other song they take in order to question who the most important band member is, protest the direction a song is taking or hold a lengthy debate about the nature of good and evil) had the audience in hysterics. After twenty years, Tripod has lost absolutely zero momentum and will presumably power ever onwards in their pleasantly unnerving hot dog van of comedy. Five stars.