Writing about Edinburgh is making me wistful, knowing it’s going on right now makes me both happy and sad. The festival really is the most wonderful bug and it’s a given that i’ll be heading back to Scotland next year for more. Here are my top three shows I saw, in order of totally subjective feelings.

Joseph Morpurgo – Hammerhead. (Pleasance Courtyard, 8pm)

Multimedia comedy is something Jospeh Morpurgo has turned into an art form, and this is the third show I’ve seen from him. Hammerhead is an unhinged masterpiece of stage craft and audience participation. His first show, Odessa, saw him weave a story about a Texan town out of a few minutes of old video footage. His second, Soothing Sounds for Baby, was his take on Desert Island Discs, with an increasingly drunk Kirsty Young. It didn’t win the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2015, which is either a terrible oversight or an indication of how good the competition was. Hammerhead is something of a change in direction as we are invited to a post-show Q&A where Morpurgo plays a monstrous, flailing actor who has just played all the parts in a 9 hour version of Frankenstein, including “the concept of wet”. As audience members are picked out to read questions, the actor’s ego grows at first as adoring fans congratulate him, then rapidly collapses when the questions turn nasty. His fictional Frankenstein production is an unmitigated disaster, and Morpurgo demonstrates this with some painfully funny projections and video pieces, questions from sources as varied as the dark web and defunct messaging services. His explanation of why his flyers were made on Microsoft Excel pushed me over the edge and, having failed to hear some jokes through laughing too much at the previous one, Hammerhead is something I will be seeing again.

In short, Morpurgo is one of the funniest and freshest performers around. Hammerhead is an exquisitely crafted hour of brilliance, where he toys with comedic conventions as easily as a cat would play with a ball of string.

Adam Hess – Cactus. (Heroes at the Hive, 6pm)

Sara Pascoe and John Robins dated, then broke up. This year their shows delve deeply into their breakups, making the most of their misery for all to see. Adam Hess wrote a show loosely about his own breakup, but doesn’t come close to the level of intimacy, choosing to focus the comedy around his own reactions to breaking up. It’s a brilliant hour of one-liners one after the other and a reminder that comics draw energy from the darker edges of life. There’s a tinge of tragedy in how Hess drinks to forget from a “world’s best nephew” mug when we discover the mug was from a charity shop. In this show, he turns every situation into something funny, with a greatly likeable stage presence.

Jon Pointing – Act Natural. (Pleasance Courtyard, 7.15pm)

Another comic monster is born! Pointing plays an hour as the ghastly Kayden Hunter in a drama workshop where his ego is the main star. It’s a brilliant take down of those self-satisfied presenters we’ve surely all seen, reminding me of an inspirational speaker I once saw reduce two woman to tears and piss off an entire room with his bizarre declarations like “I’m an outstanding teacher but none of you here seem to see it” and the like. Excellent stuff.