anoraky in the uk

One of the joys of The Edinburgh Festival is catching acts that you’d never see anywhere else this side of a lunatic asylum. The free-for-all nature of the Fringe means that if you can stump up the cash to pay for a venue you can do anything in it as long as it is legal, though there are plenty of crimes against taste here.

Yesterday’s shows threw up two 24-carat oddities. At the Underbelly at lunchtime Sirus Manzill invites you to join his collective in a show entitled Let’s Start Again. The anorak-clad (it could be a military jacket but then the title of today’s blog would make less sense) Manzill believes that dark forces have been systematically removing all the animals in the world and replacing them with robot replicas sporting hidden cameras to film our every move. Michael Portillo apparently owns the last real rabbit in England.

Manzill is a kind of surrealist survivalist. He claims to have spent the last year in a hut in Epping Forest armed to the teeth picking off these automatons and encourages the rest of us to do the same. If we can’t afford rifles he suggests catapults will do the trick. Not so much a comedy gig, more a piece of deranged performance art, complete with charts, video excerpts and catchy Britpoppy songs. File under madman or genius.

Another character who it is more certifiable than classifiable is Seattle fruitcake Reggie Watts (Underbelly). Apparently two people asked for a refund on Monday because he doesn’t sport the full Afro on his poster – after the photoshoot he decided to shave half his hair off. Not half the length, just the right half of his head.

Watts doesn’t tell gags, he simply tells deadpan nonsense stories about himself between songs which he creates by laying down his own beatbox rhythm track on a computerised gizmo then freestyling over the top. Sometimes Watts’ll do a daft dance too when the mood takes him, or stroke a female fan’s shoe. Very odd indeed and possibly the cult hit of the festival.

Maybe there is something in the Seattle water. The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players (Pleasance) – mum, dad and 12-year-old daughter Rachel on drums - play bizarre songs inspired by discarded photos found in garage sales and thrift stores. There will definitely be more about them after I’ve seen them next week.

For sheer laughs from quite famous people, Adam Buxton of Adam and Joe and Andrew Maxwell who won C4’s King Of Comedy reality TV lock-in last year will be hard to beat. Buxton, sporting a hilarious big beard, plays a spoof avant-garde filmmaker called simply Pavel, while Maxwell offers a seamless hour of stories and observations. Just when you think the world is spinning off its axis, Maxwell and Buxton (both at the Pleasance) restore some comic order.

See www/thisislondon/theatre for full reviews of Buxton/Maxwell

See www.manzillworld.co.uk for a glimpse of the mad, mad world or Sirus Manzill.

See www.reggiewatts.com/tangent for something completely different.