On both previous visits to Edinburgh, Demetri Martin's shows have been two parts confessional to one part comedy. 2003's Perrier- winning If I discussed the New Yorker's near-autistic obsession with palindromes and self-help systems. Last year, Spiral Bound took us on a fantastic voyage through the jottings in his notebook. Here was a comedian who, unusually, had a concept and really committed to it. So it's frustrating that Martin's current set, These Are Jokes, has no such conceit. It's just joke after joke - although many of them are sublime.
Ostensibly, the show divides into sections in which Martin's array of one-liners are accompanied by guitar, glockenspiel or doodles on a flip-chart. His quirky music creates just the right context for these playful quips, which turn the world ever so slightly askew. ("The digital camera enables us to reminisce immediately. 'Look at us. We were so young!'") His illustrations are more hit and miss - a handful provide visual punchlines to verbal set-ups, but too many merely reiterate what Martin has already told us in words. In any event, the difference between these sections of the show is essentially cosmetic. Tunes and pictures become random means of embroidering what might otherwise seem a rather relentless comedy litany.
Mind you, the quality of the jokes also helps keep relentlessness at bay. Martin's trademark nerdy compulsions are in evidence in the forensic way his one-liners explore language and rhetoric. In a clothes shop, a sales assistant tells him, "If you need anything, I'm Jill." To which Martin responds, "I never met a woman before with a conditional identity." He's great at nailing the idiosyncrasy of certain words. Alphabet "is like a preview: these are some of the letters you will be encountering in me". Regards are something you can send but never give.
This is cerebral and chilled out, if completely arbitrary, comedy.
· Until Monday. Box office: 0131-662 8740.
