It's one way to win over an Edinburgh crowd: hand out ice halfway through your show. Aussie comic Sarah Kendall's relationship with the audience (bordering, in the oven that is upstairs at the Pleasance, on bribery) has won her quite a following. She has a proficient line in consensual comedy: when you're introduced to someone, she asks, why does your brain refuse to register their name?
Her 2001 show was titled War, and this year's theme is Kendall's awkwardness in social situations. But on neither occasion has she pushed herself far enough into the issue to reap anything other than mild amusement.
This 50-minute set recounts several foot-in-mouth moments that Kendall cringes to remember. When she's nervous in public, she says, she instinctively lies: witness the time she claimed to speak Chinese and to have (temporarily) died by drowning.
It's entertaining but I'm not sure I believe it. This is partly down to the incongruity between her professed social unease and her profession as a comic. There are passages that hint at how good she could be if she committed herself to acerbic satire (a spoof advert in which women are made to feel ugly by the cosmetics industry), or tosilliness (a mimed harmonica solo). For now, she's likeable but unadventurous.
· Until August 30. Box office: 0131-556 6550
