The month of previews, the week to break in your show before the festival proper begins: none of it necessarily precludes raggedness at opening fringe gigs. The sketch comics Massive Dad seem to be experiencing just that at a performance with technical hitches and a curtain call after less than 45 minutes. I was a tad underwhelmed after the high quality of their 2014 debut. The material is weaker here – for now at least – even if Tessa Coates, Stevie Martin and Liz Smith are clearly still a very endearing and adept comic trio.
They’ve got a platform on which to build a show as good as their first – but the joke count is lower and the material not as confidently inhabited. Their sketches revisit familiar ideas, as with faux-70s cop show Rocket and Honk, a TV pitch by three young posh women with an imperfect grasp of both policing and the 1970s (or is it 1870s?). Later, there’s a lefty puppet-theatre troupe educating children about online privacy (“your fridge works for us now”) which is amusing in exactly the way the premise leads you to expect.
One or two sketches don’t fly: I like the idea of a restaurant with a policy for dealing with food envy, but the policy, when revealed, is a bit anticlimactic. One or two others, happily, measure up to the 2014 standard. These include a live sketch contrasted with its own storyboard, to tongue-in-cheekily demonstrate the difficulty of realising the trio’s creative vision; and a job interview where all parties are distracted by the candidate wearing a brooch. It’s delightful silly about how we project identity, how rashly we judge others, and how unhip brooches are. It also reminds us that when Massive Dad are good, they’re very good – which happens only intermittently here.
• At Pleasance Dome until 31 August. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
