Before Stephen Hawking's Brief History of Time there was Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. John Cleese, Douglas Adams, Peter Cook, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, David Frost, Eric Idle, Sandi Toskvig, Clive James, Michael Frayn and Jonathan Miller are just a few of the world-famous comedy performers and writers who learned their craft as students in Cambridge.

The focus for most was the famous Footlights, the University's drama club. For decades it presented nothing more challenging than occasional student reviews, but all that changed in the late 1950s with Beyond the Fringe. This satirical show transformed comedy in Britain when it transferred to London's West End and then to Broadway, teaming Cambridge's Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller with Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett from Oxford. Soon the Footlights were performing regularly at the Edinburgh Fringe, and this proved a fruitful nursery for the talents of Cambridge students who went on to write and appear in such successful TV shows as Monty Python, The Goodies and Fawlty Towers.

Visitors today might be lucky and catch a Footlights show, or a visiting ex-Cambridge comic performing at one of the city's two main theatres, the Arts Theatre and the ADC. If not quite as ancient as some of the university colleges, they both have a fascinating history of their own.

The ADC (Amateur Dramatic Club) in Park Street is the oldest university playhouse in Britain. It was founded in 1854 in what was then the Hoop Hotel, and very much against the wishes of the stuffy senior dons. It burnt down in 1933 and a new building was erected within eighteen months. It was the start of a new era, too, as women were allowed on stage for the first time. Prior to that men performed all female roles. Since then the ADC has continued to flourish, and directors of the calibre of Sir Peter Hall and Sam 'American Beauty' Mendes started their careers as ADC members, as did actors Sir Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and Emma Thompson.

The Arts Theatre has its own unique story too. It was founded by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1936, and today is a bright and modern theatre which retains one of Keynes's original principles: that selected amateur groups from the town and the university would be allowed to mount productions without the risk of incurring a loss. Trevor Nunn did his first productions at the Arts, while comic writer/performers who made their stage debuts here include Douglas Adams, Eric Idle, Clive James and Tim Brooke-Taylor.

The ADC and the Arts Theatre have productions all year round, so have a night out here and you may be seeing the next John Cleese or Emma Thompson treading the boards. And the right comedy show might just prove that Cambridge is not only historical but also hysterical too.