Last year's heroes

Glaswegian standup Kevin Bridges (four stars) had a strange Fringe last year. A barnstorming performance on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow in June had propelled him instantly into the comedy big league. But since Festival venues are booked in the spring, he was forced to play a room too small for his reputation, leading to awkward gigs in front of confused audience members who thought they’d come to see a star. He has no such trouble this year in the Assembly’s enormous Music Hall, and the 23-year-old fills the space with admirable confidence and panache.

This is observational comedy with honesty and wit. Bridges resists the trap of pigeonholing himself as a working-class comic, or blanding out his material to suit an imagined demographic. When he talks of elements of life as a youth in Clydebank, such as sketchy house parties known as "empties" that were thrown when people’s parents were away, the ring of truth is obvious and there are laughs of recognition from many people in his diverse audience. When he tackles less personal subjects, such as the frustration of voice recognition systems on telephone booking lines, his skill as a storyteller turns what could be a fairly generic piece of observation into something very funny indeed.

Bridges could still afford to relax a bit more; there’s something almost too rigidly controlled about his style and the audience clearly want to chat to him more than he allowed them to. But this will come with time, and if he can reach stadium-filler status whilst maintaining this degree of integrity, he will have achieved a rare thing.

The darlings of musical comedy in 2009, Frisky and Mannish (three stars) tackle last year’s hype head-on in their new show. Coming onstage to a rock star’s welcome, they read out quotes from some of their more enthusiastic reviews, while pretending to be blinded by flash photography and unfiltered adoration. Later in the show they bring the notices up again, berating certain journalists for factual inaccuracies and nonsensical assertions in an amusing song to the tune of The Ting Ting’s ‘That’s Not My Name.’ It’s a little self-important, but the audience clearly feel that the duo deserves to be indulged.

The rest of the set is similar to their first outing, with the focus on what they call "collision theory" – throwing two seemingly very different artists or genres together to see what comes out. At its best, this produces some funny and unexpected sections, such as a reimagining of Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ ‘Come On Eileen’ as a piece of working-class angst in the style of a Blood Brothers musical number. At its weakest, it’s simply a technical exercise that impresses but leaves the corners of the mouth untroubled. But there’s no doubt that F&M have found their pop-head fanbase and their success looks set to continue.

Frisky and Mannish joke that their act is "not eligible for any awards," but the man who pipped Kevin Bridges and others to the Best Newcomer slot at last year’s Edinburgh is scarcely more classifiable. Jonny Sweet’s (four stars) winning show Mostly About Arthur was a fictional piece of biography about his dead brother, in which his dapper, enthusiastic and slightly crazed persona won audiences over to his esoteric worldview. This year, Sweet has hardly succumbed to mass-market populism after his taste of success; instead, he’s decided to give an hour-long PowerPoint lecture on the decommissioned naval destroyer the HMS Nottingham. It would be criminal to give much more away, because this inspired piece of anti-comedy relies on the element of surprise. So I will be brief: it’s surprisingly cheerful, truly Fringey and well worth your time.