Comedy in a portacabin

Hurray for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and hurray for the preview week - my favourite time of year in Edinburgh.

Last night was the opening night at Pleasance Courtyard and as is tradition a bunch of us headed down there after work to take in the atmosphere, expensive watered-down lager, and free tickets.

I was lucky enough to go to three shows, one of which I paid for in advance and two which were free.

Tom Binns in Ivan Brackenbury's hospital radio remix was first, and the one I laughed at most. The comedy was centred around a DJ who played requests for patients but the songs he played were very inappropriate in the circumstances. In many ways this is very cheap humour, and I'm pretty good at song recognition so I often was the first one to get the joke (smug), but it was excellent value for free. (4*)

Andrew Lawrence: The too ugly for television tour 2010 was next, the one we'd paid for. We've seen this guy before, and found him to be intelligent and edgy humour. This year it was fine, funny enough, but seemed to have lost the edgyness really. Possibly dumbed down for a wider audience we felt. Disappointing. (3*)

The Real MacGuffins was the last one. Reasonably amusing, not at all embarassing, but felt a bit like what it was, which was some middle aged Oxbridge graduates attempting to do sketch comedy. (2*)

Off work now til Tuesday for more of the same.