By the time this is published, the shortlist will have been announced for this year’s if.comedy awards (formerly the Perriers). I make no attempt at prediction, in this year when the grapevine has been significantly less a-hum than usual; I simply note what has tickled my own fancy.

Some previous Perrier faces have made admired returns. Albuquerque duo The Pajama Men were assured even on their 2004 Edinburgh début, and garnered a Best Newcomers nomination then. This year’s show Versus vs Versus mines the same territory: interweaving series of sketches featuring characters such as chivalric Roman heroes, cracked newscasters and the eerie Jennifer and her father, which gradually coalesce into an entirely implausible climax. Words, ideas and images drive each other to extremes of absurdity. Elsewhere in the same Assembly complex, Frank Woodley – half of 1994’s wild-card Perrier winners Lano & Woodley – offers Possessed, in which an agoraphobic Australian finds his body jointly occupied by the spirit of a 19th-century Irish girl. Woodley is a master of slapstick and shows it off on a cleverly designed, intricate set; he also finds it hard to resist an ad-lib opportunity, which somehow proves endearing even when the gag itself tanks.

At the Underbelly, Woodley’s compatriot Sammy J presents what is surely the finest Australian magical-woodland-based puppet musical on this year’s Fringe. Sammy and his puppeteering comrade prove similarly unable to resist extemporising: many of the funniest gags at the performance I saw were derived from misbehaving radio mics. And any show which opens with a bouncy, singalong number entitled “Fuck Walt Disney” is giving a fairly clear indicator of where it is going.

The Penny Dreadfuls have been acquiring a growing reputation for the past couple of years. Aeneas Faversham Forever is a narrative-based slice of English silliness very much in the tradition of Jones & Palin’s Ripping Yarns and early Stephen Fry. Of the straightforward stand-ups, Andy Zaltzman is not so much satirical as scathingly sarcastic about the excesses and enormities of our glorious society, and also harbours a love of ludicrously overwrought analogies such as when he speaks of political leaders “at each other’s throats like two top surgeons in a one-on-one emergency tracheotomy operation”.

Written for the Financial Times.