James Acaster

Amongst Other Things, Pleasance Courtyard Below, 9:45pm

James Acaster is an endearing, unpredictable, quietly audacious young man who combines understated physical comedy with gentle absurdism. He has a blonde mop, a slender, perpendicular frame conducted by wiry, expressive hands, and a soft, slightly nasal Northamptonshire accent. He holds the microphone by the bottom with two pinched fingers as if it were a drawing pin and does a funny thing with his eyebrows, a suggestive, old-fashioned, Eric Idle-style double-raise that makes me laugh every time.

 
He has a lovely sense of rhythm and control, bold enough to slow the tempo right down, to dwell on the consciously banal, and to lower his voice to a half-whisper (there are two tantalising moments within the set where he makes no noise at all for at least two minutes). He is also a dab hand with an audience. He struck gold our night with a gentleman who turned out to be an old university friend of his dad's, and later with two laddish locals, catching one falling asleep twenty minutes in and cajoling the other into re-enacting a tandem sky-dive. Very occasionally, his callback-putdowns might be too clever and faint for their own good (possibly me being slow, but a couple of references seemed to go astray with our sleepy 9:45pm mid-first-week crowd). But this knack at locating fun punters seems to come instinctively and will only improve (about a month ago, for what it's worth, I saw Acaster compère a comedy evening in front of a much larger, rather lethargic and begrudging Shepherd's Bush audience and he was equally impressive, this time happening across a man who drew shoes for a living and changed seats after both intervals: Acaster found him both times).

The subject matter in this, his first solo show, is ingeniously off-beat - the psychology behind the act of 'hiding'; different types of doughnuts and the reactions they elicit; dating as a bouncy castle – and it is handled with warmth and eloquence. The final ten minutes, about a teddy bear called Willoughby that James' mum knitted when he left home, is one of the sweetest, bravest codas I've seen in an Edinburgh show (curiously, both Acaster and Alex Horne feature teddies sitting behind microphones, though Horne's panda moves and talks while Willoughby very much doesn't).

This is a joy: a clever, fresh, acute and deceptively dangerous debut that picks up on every tiny ambiguity, awkwardness or nervous lilt in the audience members he picks on. The show probably deserves a Best Newcomer nomination, but more importantly, this heralds the arrival of perhaps the subtlest figure in the new, post-Key wave.