Chris Addison is considered the country's most erudite young stand-up - or "Edinburgh's Favourite Ponce", in his own phrase. This year's show sees him broach evolution; we are, according to the title of his show, The Ape That Got Lucky. It is a trifle disappointing that this supposed thinker doesn't return from his delve into the history with anything more than a few gags. But, in a stand-up comedy context, this remains learned stuff - and Addison derives some very amusing routines from man's trajectory from monkey to Mail-reader.
He takes as his starting point the fact that we share 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees. He is seeking that other 2%. "What separates us from the beasts, daddy?" a child asks his dad at the zoo. "That big wall there," comes the reply. Addison's familiar comic technique is to apply British values onto the evolving savages of the Savannah. So cave people invented language in order to conduct domestic disputes ("It's all coming out now!") and our ancestors developed their line in Anglo-Saxon grumpiness when they found themselves stranded in pissy Britain by continental drift.
The debonair comic rushes through his set at a breathless pace - a necessity, I suppose, when you're squeezing aeons into a single hour. His is an elevated brand of comedy, which includes an impassioned and well-observed broadside against the Daily Mail's horror of political correctness (this is a historical journey with wide detours) and the Spanish flair for inventive animal killing. I'd have liked Addison to be less afraid of educating as well as entertaining us - didn't his research fascinate as well as amuse him? But perhaps, in a show that regards rather sceptically our superiority to our simian forebears, too much erudition could be counterproductive.
Until August 26. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
