If you're not white, how should you address race in your comedy? At a festival where two acts of East Asian origin have titled their shows Mellow Yellow and No More Mr Rice Guy, you might think self-mockery was the way to go. Nish Kumar has been advised to try that, or, by contrast, to avoid the subject altogether. He's concluded that there's such a thing as "correct race comedy" – cue near-the-knuckle caricature of standup of Indian origin making like Bollywood – and that what he's doing isn't it.
But if Kumar won't pander to our stereotypes, he doesn't stint on making us laugh – and making us think. As you'd guess from the tongue-in-cheek title, his new set Ruminations on the Nature of Subjectivity, showcases an anxious, overthinking comic with much to say about race, the brittle foundations of his ego and the internet's corrosive effect on our concentration.
Kumar doesn't hang around: there's lots in this show, and he clips through it, powered by exaggerated frustration that his life, and the world, aren't turning out as expected. The first section turns on unsolicited counsel he once received to be more aggressive to white audiences. This leads to a discussion of a recent poll that revealed some glaring – and, in Kumar's treatment, droll – contradictions in white British attitudes to multiculturalism. To sum up: brown offspring, good; brown prime minister, not so sure.
Even sharper is the section in which Kumar confronts his own egoism, pessimism and neuroses. You get the measure of how fretful he is from the skit about trying to use reverse psychology to fall asleep; and how egotistical from his account of once admiring his own conversation so much that he forgot what he was talking about. It's a tight, smart set from a comic who confesses self-absorption while engaging expansively with the way we live now.
• Until 24 August. Box office: 0131-226 0000. Venue: Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh.
