It’s been an Edinburgh full of good shows by good comics. It’s not been an Edinburgh full of the kind of shows you excitedly text your friends about the moment you file out of the room. Which is why this extraordinarily fresh and funny gang show is causing such a stir.

Pappy’s Fun Club is a load of old nonsense from start to finish. But, like its recent reference point, the rambunctious sketch trio We Are Klang, it’s a nonsense underpinned by careful construction. The twentysomething quartet – Matthew Crosby, Tom Parry, Brendan Dodds and Ben Clark – loll around as we come in. They start with a song. Pappy is ill, their tax situation is a nightmare, the Fun Club is in danger. Don’t worry what that means – it doesn’t mean much. Just enough to hold in place the sketches, squabbles and stitch-ups to come.

If you’ve ever seen the Will Ferrell “More Cowbell!” sketch from Saturday Night Live – it’s on YouTube if you haven’t – you’ll recognise a spiritual cousin in their enthusiastic miming of Bob Dylan’s never-ending Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. Childish, you think as it starts – until it’s made exquisite by the standout comic chops of Parry.

Other OK ideas – a TV prankster called Len Taunton; a hospital staffed exclusively by undercover journalists – are also made exceptional by the tenacity of their execution. Apparently throwaway ideas are reincorporated later. The players’ personalities are always present. It’s kinetic rather than chaotic. It ends, perfectly, with the punters being roped into the Pappy Play finale: “Good luck,” they’re told, “expressing the onstage chemistry that we so deftly fake”. Thankfully, though, they’ve been faking it for three years: the experience shows.

There are a few flat moments, and the show appears to be very much driven by Parry (red-cheeked, preposterous) and Crosby (compact, controlling) with the other two looking larky in between. Unlike most Fringe comics, they’ve got nothing to say about jihad, global warming or their girlfriends’ private parts. Instead, Pappy’s Fun Club does exactly what it says on the tin. And it’s glorious stuff.

Box office: 0845 2601234. Extra weekend shows at the Pleasance Courtyard, 0131-556 6550

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