One of the new breed of multitasking young comics, Tom Basden is on overdrive at this year's fringe. He is starring in Mark Watson's theatre installation The Hotel, while his own play, Party, is on at the Assembly Rooms. But it's kooky musical comedy that made Basden's name – he won the best newcomer prize in 2007 – and he's getting better at it. This year's set includes gnomic ditties worthy of a less wrinkly, less dead Ivor Cutler, and, projected on an upstage screen, Shrigley-ish doodles, driftwood from cyberspace and nonsense arranged in neat little PowerPoint lists.
So, yes, Basden is firmly in the winsome generation of standups, whose shows are like scrapbooks of their ingénue imagination. And slideshows of cartoons, or of supposedly hilarious Chinese shop signs, are – let's be frank – not the best use to which live performance can be put. But they make their small contributions to a charming hour. Basden mines Google for some choice comedy nuggets, entering incomplete phrases like "Is it OK to" and "Elton John is", then marvelling at the results. Later, he screens photos of several new facial expressions he has created, then performs a one-man play that struggles to put them into action.
And then there are the songs. Some of them are just musical haiku; few have flashy lyrics. But they encapsulate Basden's gentle, oddball worldview, and serve as a reminder of how funny mildly amusing things can be when paired with a strumming guitar or, er, a foot-pump-driven harmonica. Most memorable are Basden's opener, about a woman married to a horse, and a song that reduces movies to pithy formulas. "Talking animals portray racial stereotypes? Kids' films!" Basden's show is no more focused than his career – and in neither case is that proving much of a problem.
Until 30 August. Box office: 0131-556 6550.
