My favourite comedy act at this year's Fringe doesn't tell any jokes at all. Men in Coats abide by their closing music ? "A little less conversation, a little more action, please" ? and do an hour of purely visual quickfire gags.
Zipped up in matching parkas, Mick Dow (the tall blonde one) and Maddy Sparham (the short, scruffy one) have their own brand of magic and mime. And if that raises troubling associations with Paul Daniels and street entertainers, then think intead of Eric Morecambe grabbing himself by the throat from behind a curtain. The MIC aren't about baffling us with their illusions, they're about reminding us how delightful such illusions can be.
For the past two years, the duo has been doing a 15-minute cabaret turn that won the Hackney Empire New Acts award in 2001. Now they're doing their first full-length show, and it's remarkable how they sustain the laughs for an hour ? all at punishing pace and choreographed to a Latino easy-listening soundtrack. As long as you don't worry about how much sweat must be collecting in those parkas, the show is one of the most fun things you'll see this side of a Harold Lloyd film.
The best of the comedians who prefer a little more conversation and a little less action, Daniel Kitson was a revelation last year, and he's progressed in leaps and bounds since then. His fashion sense hasn't improved, though. He still doesn't buy any clothes that aren't brown, his specs are still two sizes too large, and he still has, by his own admission, the face of a pervert. What's so heartening is his new insistence that he wouldn't have it any other way: he'd rather hang himself by his microphone cord than put on a suit, go to clubs or get drunk (he takes a strict anti-drugs, pro-cake line). Belying his casual, jolly delivery, his loathing of all forms of conformism is palpable.
There's something heroic about this militancy. In recent years at the Fringe, apolitical silliness has held sway ? Kitson himself falls back on childhood reminiscences for the second half of his show. But this year the trend is shifting towards something different: comedians with a point of view.
Andrew Maxwell is another example. A young Irish stand-up who must have had intimate relations with the blarney stone, he starts with a cheeky, chatty riff about Scottish football hooligans being even more pale and boney than he is. But by the end of a great show he's sneaked his way over to a trenchant denunciation of the capitalist system that takes in both Osama bin Laden and the chocolate machines on the tube.
If you are in the mood for nonsense, mind you, you're catered for by the mighty Ross Noble, bird-brained rambler extraordinaire, and by Noel Fielding, who was nominated for the Perrier three years ago as one half of the Mighty Boosh. (He's the one with his hair in a Rod Stewart stack and with an arrow-sharp nose and chin ? imagine Sherlock Holmes in a Britpop band.) This time around, Fielding performs without Julian Barratt, which allows his imagination to fly off even further. Having been introduced as "the man who's part hen, part Blu-Tack", he zig-zags through tales of penguins and rock-climbing, telepathy and Tron, and an animal orgy in an enchanted forest. But instead of relying on the zaniness of the material, he delivers it with a comedian's sense of timing, and with such speed and fluency that you suspect he actually understands what he's on about. He does acknowledge his ridiculousness at one point, though. "Imagine having that as one of your punchlines," he muses.
The most controversial comedy shows this year have been Tina C's Twin Towers Tribute and Richard Herring's Talking Cock. Tina C, especially, has been condemned in the more stupid newspapers, mainly because of her questionable poster: the drag queen is super-imposed on a photo of New York, her legs in the place of the World Trade Center.
In fact, Chris Green's Nashville diva doesn't make light of the tragedy. Presenting songs from her album, 9/11 ? 24/7, Tina C is a hilarious parody of those American superstars who profess to be moved by global events, only to reveal their own self-importance, their ignorance of the rest of the world and their willingness to hitch a ride on a career-reviving bandwagon. She is the spiritual daughter of Dame Edna Everage and Otis Lee Crenshaw. Or should that be the spiritual son?
Richard Herring's show is a response to The Vagina Monologues. Just three months ago he posted two questionnaires on the internet ? one for men, one for women, both asking for people's feelings towards the penis. Soon, he had several thousand responses, and these are the basis of a thoughtful, sensitive examination of the phallus's social history, with quite a few knob gags tossed in.
Francesca Martinez is a London comic whose cerebral palsy has drawn more attention to her than might be helpful at this stage. She has a solid half-hour on her disabilities, but her more traditional material is just padding. As for Rob Deering, he has some jokes so feeble they should be rolled up inside a cracker. However, he's likeable enough to be forgiven and he comes armed with some inspired multi-media gimmicks. We see genuine footage of his appearance on 15 To 1; there's a short film depicting a battle between two generations of Action Man toys; and his decision to play us one of the cringing, Cure-influenced songs he wrote as a teenager is as fearless as a dozen confessional comedy routines.