What's so funny? The Pin are among this year's one-to-watch sketch troupes, and are – like last year's newbies, Sheeps, alumni of the UK's most gilded comedy production line, Cambridge Footlights.
If only other universities encouraged kids to aim for the top. Apologies. I'm sure The Pin's Oxbridge background is neither here nor there. The Pin are impressively smart and slick – although it is a brand of smart slickness that one tends to associate with male sketch troupes who've found one another under the dreaming spires.
What's their schtick? They're a trio - Ben Ashenden, Mark Fiddaman and Alex Owen - whose fleet-of-foot show rewinds and fast-forwards to reveal connections between seemingly disparate sketches. It's structurally quite clever, and neatly executed.
And what do these connected/unconnected sketches involve? Someone from the band Wheatus reduced to working in a hi-fi store. A man wearing a suit of bees. Gay love in a chain gang. (It's an all-male sketch troupe: homoeroticism comes as standard.)
Highlights? They have an eye for a good parody, spiking the Austen-era convention of the servant whispering information into the master's ear, and aping those Shakespearean fools who lustily over-telegraph every innuendo. And there's a great little joke about a private eye making a mess of an adultery investigation.
Lowlights? A few annoying sketches ("I'm getting sucked off on a Virgin train," ho-hum), overuse of a particular mistaken identity gag – and a general facileness, a sense that The Pin's act is (for now at least) comedy about itself, machine-tooled for success, but with no discernible origin in lived experience or a distinctive take on the world.
The future of sketch comedy? Probably not. But an accomplished example of where it's at now.
• Until 27 August. Box office: 0131-556 6550
