Fakespeare

This Guy at Night

The Slutcracker

Pajama Men

Ricky Gervais

Stewart Francis

Bridget Christie

Every year, you can hear the same, furious debate over the Fringe’s big comedy prize — this year known simply as the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. It boils down to a tussle between straightforward stand-up and ingeniously wrought high-concept shows. “Why can’t a good club comic win?” someone will complain. The answer, ultimately, is that, if they did, with a stag-night-pleasing set, the bright light of UK comedy would be dimmed for at least a year.

The awards were launched in the early 1980s, colliding with the arrival of Channel 4 and a burst of young talent. Writing a brand-new hour of carefully constructed material each year became the basic condition of entry to the creative part of the UK’s live comedy scene. It’s why the good American comics head here; at home, they could make 20 minutes of material last five solid years and still buy a house in Beverly Hills (right, Emo Philips?), but somehow feel a little shabby. It’s why our writers and performers are still delivering, despite cash draining out of the film and TV system. And it’s why a solid club comic should never win the award.

Take this year’s shortlist — John Bishop, Idiots of Ants, Russell Kane, Jon Richardson, Tom Wrigglesworth and Tim Key. On the face of it, it’s a pretty solid year for pretty solid stand-up. There’s a sketch show, sure, but no character comedy, no musical tomfoolery and, adding to the Ashes humiliation, no Australians. Is it finally club comedy’s year? Well, no. All these performers have raised their game by factors of 10 — from their usual sets and from their last appearance at the Fringe. Whether that’s the artful theme added to Idiots of Ants’ natural spiky energy, the trials of fatherhood woven effortlessly into John Bishop’s cheery tales or the heartwarming majesty in Tom Wrigglesworth’s everyday adventure (all reviewed here in recent weeks, and scoring three, three and four stars res­pectively), they’ve found a new perspective on the world.

Russell Kane, in particular, seems to be at a turning point. His stand-up (Pleasance, 9.20pm) is as bold and defiant as ever, but shot through with more vulnerability, self-doubt even, than previous years have suggested possible. Unlike last year’s mannered and technical performance, this one is raw and sometimes needy, with tales of fleeing his threatening council-estate father for the cheerful insouciance of his riotous gran, ending in a perfectly formed humiliation that toys with a comedy cliché before stamping it down for ever. His interest is the complex dance we perform as we struggle with our identity. Kane’s dance reveals a tenderness, in addition to his considerable intellectual powers. These are on full display in his other show, Fakespeare (Pleasance, 2.10pm), a full iambic-pentameter, rhyming-coup­lets tale of a City banker contemplating the failure of his schemes. Kane creates his cross-century mash-up with the joy of language dripping from his lips and echoes of Steven Berkoff at his youthful best. Watch him closely.

Despite Jon Richardson’s romantic title, This Guy at Night (Pleasance, 8.30pm), this is the kind of stand-up you’d get from Roo and Eeyore supporting Morecambe and Wise in Manchester — all inside one person’s head. Richardson riffs on his OCD — a state of mind that makes his explicit quest for perfection clearly doomed. As Angry Jon rages at the futility of said mission, as well as at BT, the BNP, Tube strikes, dating and relationships, Jolly Jon pops his head round the door to deliver cheeky observations and a slick skit on a disastrous ice-skating experiment. It’s observational comedy from a viewpoint just beyond the realms of your experience.