Fringe comedy

Impending fatherhood has made a man out of Jefferies. An even more smartly offensive man, if his opening remarks about dating Michael Phelps's ex-girlfriend are anything to go by. His own pregnant girlfriend is in the audience, as if that would make any difference to this comedy iconoclast.

Organised religion gets a good shoeing, as we hurtle down Jefferies's "just hit the kids, it never did me any harm" highway to Hell.

Living in the US has finally paid off with a sitcom commission for Comedy Central and, more importantly, enriched his observational skills. He relishes the fall-out created by his naturally contrapuntal premises, embracing the chaos, balling it in his fist and firing it back into the crowd.

Jefferies is still not recommended for the faint-hearted, almost disgusting himself with the candour of his anecdotes, which of course is what makes them laugh-out-loud funny.

The ludicrous scenario constructed for him to lead a Charlie Chaplin-like existence with his motherless child pushes the boundaries of taste, but ticks his two favourite boxes: cruel and funny.

His support of gay marriage lacks any libertarian principle, but has a twisted desire to ensure equality in suffering for all humanity.

Catch him now while he is still like a ripe comedy Camembert, fruity but strong and, to some tastes, sophisticated.

Until August 26.

Josie Long – Pleasance One

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Despite turning 30 this year, Long still has the glorious demeanour of a giant child who has consumed too many Smarties, and that image is still a glorious deception.

She is a comedian with serious alternative rock credibility, as being an honorary post with the Fence Organisation will attest, not to mention stints with BBC Radio 6 Music.

Yet Long opens to the strains of Hue And Cry's Labour Of Love, a superb piece of 1980s Scottish agitpop wrapped in a blue-eyed soul anthem.

As evidenced by last year's show, The Future Is Another Place, the politicising of Josie Long is an amusing process, although becoming accustomed to the Tory way of operating makes her madder every day. Some choice toilet humour involving Michael Gove is particularly rough, offset sweetly by a bizarre Ed Miliband impression straight out of the Spike Milligan drawer.

Revealing she had a to-do list for completion before her forthcoming birthday may not be a surprise, certainly compared to what it included.

Contempt for high street supermarkets is hardly tempered by her awareness of the fragility of the food chain and attempts to forge her own links: "I recently grew the ghost of a tomato - "

The wise money would be on Josie Long making more appearances on political panel shows rather than 8 Out Of 10 Cats in the future. Her scatological style hides a multitude of philosophical complexities.

Until August 27.

Sammy J and Randy: The Inheritance, Underbelly

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Australia's most celebrated comedy duo prove less is more in this award-winning new show. If there was a niggle before it was that Sammy and Heath McIvor – puppeteer par excellence – over-egged the plot pudding.

There was so much going on it could get a little blurred, but the premise of The Inheritance is crystal clear, but then greed is like that.

It allows the audience to savour every syllable of the dialogue between the polite potty-mouthed protagonists, who could well be cut from the same cloth.

The Sugababes get a slicing and dicing in the most incidental offhand fashion best reserved for corporate artistic irrelevancies, but the sub-woofer sequence is textbook comedy answer and response, and extremely funny.

A knockabout routine about car rental companies is sufficiently vicious to make the next time Sammy books a fly-drive very interesting. Then, without skipping a beat, we are transported to a world of oriental shadow puppets mired in an old-style British farce.

The production and set lend themselves perfectly to this knock-about caper, and in Sammy J you have contemporary entertainment's prime exponent of such silliness. We are immersed in innuendo, serenaded in smut, and sent home thoroughly amused, as much by McIvor's on-stage shadow-shuffling as the dexterity of his work as Randy with his big purple head.

Until August 27.