COHOES — Comedy fans, make note of this name: William Hughes. When you see him on a lineup in the region or happen across him at an open-mic event, he's worth your attention.

A Fort Ann native who now lives in Cohoes, Hughes has been performing stand-up comedy for only a few years, but the guy is good. His humor is fresh, topical and in no small part local in focus. As he showed Saturday night by quickly winning over a crowd of several hundred that had come to the Cohoes Music Hall to see a very different sort of comedian, the nasal-voiced, squinty-eyed celebrant of crudity Gilbert Gottfried, Hughes is broadly appealing, smart and beginning to acquire the smooth professionalism of a seasoned comic.

During a 15-minute set tailored for the venue, Hughes both celebrated and mocked Cohoes, observing he'd gotten a good house for a bargain price, one of the reasons for which, he said, is an inferior school district. After chiding city residents for voting down a library budget that would have resulted in a small tax increase, Hughes noted that a vote on the school budget is coming up. If voters reject that too, Hughes said, "You don't get to complain about the kids being stupid."

Describing a confrontation with a neighbor, he described her as having "one inch (of) fingernail for every year of high school that she missed."

Fort Ann is even worse, Hughes said: "Skoal is its own food group." Career options are limited to prison guard, prisoner and dairy cow, he said, "and in two of those, you're guaranteed to have your nipples touched."

If Hughes is at the beginning of his comedy career, Gottfried seems clearly at the end of his. Now 63 but looking frailer and at times a decade older, Gottfried is frozen in the past, his references badly dated and his reliance on cheap shock even more pronounced.

One extended joke — still in his act despite having performed it at The Comedy Works in Albany almost four years ago — included mention of actors Gary Coleman, who died seven years ago, and Herve Villechaize, who died in 1993, and "that short, disgusting woman with the squeaky voice from 'Poltergeist,'" a film that came out three and a half decades ago. Gottfried referenced a six-year-old memoir by actor-musician Mackenzie Phillips, and made a few glancing mentions of the brouhaha that resulted from his tasteless tweets about the 2011 Japanese tsunami that got him fired as the voice of the duck mascot in Aflac insurance commercials. That, too, was six years ago, though Gottfried seems to think it recent enough that he didn't need to offer sufficient context for anyone unfamiliar with the matter to be able to appreciate his lame jokes about it.

There's a significant and telling difference between focusing on the past and merely recycling old material; Gottfried is guilty of the latter. Worse, his crudeness feels designed to evoke facile revulsion. There are all manner of ways to use humor to address pedophilia and child sexual abuse — though a fraught topic, it's been handled smartly, provocatively, outrageously and insightfully by other comics — but Gottfried settles for the obvious and the merely tasteless. None of it bears repeating here.

New York City-based Justin Smith, the featured comic for the evening, delivered a solid, 20-minute set that mostly concerned itself with his status as an obese person and with jokes about the millennial generation. The set could have been better organized and shaped, and Smith repeatedly felt it necessary to point out to the audience how well crafted a joke was immediately after telling it. Perhaps, but if a comic has to delineate the merits of a joke, it still needs work.

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*****

Comedy review

Gilbert Gottfried

With Justin Smith and William Hughes

When: 8 p.m. Saturday

Where: Cohoes Music Hall, 58 Remsen St., Cohoes

Length: Gottfried, 45 minutes; Smith, 20 minutes; Hughes, 15 minutes

The crowd: About 300, vocally enthusiastic.