As comedy proliferates across cyberspace, the industry impatiently awaits its first internet superstar. Scotland, as so often, is a step ahead. Limmy (real name Brian Limond) is the unemployed Glaswegian whose homemade podcast, World of Glasgow, stormed the iTunes chart and made fans of Franz Ferdinand. His fast-selling Fringe debut is a mix of solo sketch comedy and YouTube inserts, distinguished from the festival norm as much by its working-class credentials (Limmy reports back from Glasgow's criminal, deadbeat hinterland) as by its flashes of an original comic voice.
The stage skits don't quite pack the punch of Limmy's best video work, but this is a bold first step from virtual to actual comedy. I hadn't previously seen the videos with which Limmy established his Scottish fanbase. Judging by this selection, at worst they are a bit crass (a junkie auditions for Big Brother, a man stares lasciviously at his dog's genitals); and at best, they take affecting snapshots of urban alienation. Limmy sifts through the human flotsam washed up in inhuman places, like the 32-year-old man vainly seeking an adult experience to rival the playground swing.
The same spirit pervades Limmy's live sketches, as when a father sells his son to a gangster to pay off his debts. What will become of the wee boy, demands his outraged wife. "I don't know," declaims our man, affecting rectitude, "and I don't want to know."
These are the lives that get left behind while Scotland sets about its high-flying business, which Limmy satirises with a routine about a marketing consultant promoting the Edinburgh Fringe by trimming people's fringes. (Brand awareness increases by 1,600% so who cares that one woman is accidentally scalped along the way?)
Limmy's talent is as wayward as that barber's scissors. But he has such an Artful Dodger's charm that the download of his online success to the real world looks assured.
· Until August 26. Box office: 0131-558 7272.
