<preform>Killing Paul McCartney/Bombshells/The Blind Fiddler, Assembly Rooms<br>Thom Pain/New Spaces For Role Models/Nine Days Crazy/The Elephant Woman, Pleasance<br/>Harry and Me, Gilded Balloon<br/>Bima &amp; Bramati, Traverse</preform>

What's so funny about pain, murder and mania?

It's been a funny week for Fringe theatregoers, a funny kind of anti-comic week. The festival has been swamped for years by stand-ups, but now an intriguing transition is taking place. Several smart dramatists and experimental theatre-makers have created what look like comedy shows but are mournful, worried and disturbing works.

It's been a funny week for Fringe theatregoers, a funny kind of anti-comic week. The festival has been swamped for years by stand-ups, but now an intriguing transition is taking place. Several smart dramatists and experimental theatre-makers have created what look like comedy shows but are mournful, worried and disturbing works.

Thom Pain is fascinating. You'd think this guy was just another gagman in a suit and geeky specs. However, he kicks off with a definition of "fear" which is unnervingly insane. He is a philosophical tease with witty timing, but there's something deeply screwed-up about his icy glare. Underneath his throwaway style, desperation and nihilism are festering and he keeps telling fractured stories like Beckett's compulsive narrators. This is what you might call psychoticomedy. It is actually written by US playwright Will Eno - a protégé of Edward Albee - and chillingly performed by the Obie-winning actor, James Urbaniak. Outstanding.

Dramatist Nick Grosso has been thinking along weirdly similar lines in his new solo piece, Killing Paul McCartney. A stand-up called Tommy Kay (excellent Jake Wood) greets us with a "cheeky chappy" grin and slating patter about women drivers, his ex, celebrity babes, shopping and assassinating McCartney. Post-alternative, politically incorrect comedy has been around for a while, and you might reckon Grosso is just joining the unreconstructed jokers. However, Tommy is entertaining with a nasty edge and Grosso makes those tricks of the trade - the rapid delivery, running gags and illogical jumps - sound perilously like mania.

New Spaces For Role Models, the new piece by Julian Fox (previously acclaimed for Goodbye Seattle Coffee Company) is, unfortunately, more dull than amusing about his nerdy obsession with Gatwick Airport, although he does subtly lament the loss of a richer, more rooted culture. In Nine Days Crazy, the experimentalist Chris Goode prances - with bells on - before a projection screen showing whirling maps. This is the dramatised diary of a disconsolate thesp, with Goode telling how he swore he'd never act again, left London, and recreated the nine-day jig to Norwich famously danced by Shakespeare's miffed clown, Will Kemp. This is a mildly amusing show with a slow burn. It is touchingly personal about feeling lost.

A more exciting discovery is the multimedia monologue, Harry and Me, by Robin Deacon - a university teacher-cum-performance artist. This piece centres on a video of Deacon's adolescent appearance in Highway, Harry Secombe's Anglia TV equivalent of Songs of Praise. The clips are hilariously cheesy and Deacon is zany, cramming himself into his old school uniform to conduct a seminar on the footage. What's startling is he is actually investigating a race-related conspiracy theory. He shows us old local newspaper clippings which surmised that a few black kids (of which he was one) were just shoved into the school choir to fit the ethnically integrated image which Highway demanded. Deacon digs out end-of-term reports praising his amenable nature. He also deciphers encoded messages in the chosen hymn. The daring and skill of this piece lies in its ambivalent mix of anger and humour - even as Deacon hints it could all be a faked, farcically paranoid fantasy.

Over at the Assembly Rooms, the punters are pouring in to see the West End star Caroline O'Connor in Bombshells by Joanna Murray Smith (whose play, Honour, was at the National last year). Depressingly this "hot ticket" turns out to be a string of cliché-ridden vignettes wherein O'Connor - with tireless charisma - plays a bride with cold feet, a frazzled mum, a widow getting laid, and an infant starlet. Likewise, The Blind Fiddler by Marie Jones (of Stones in His Pockets fame) is drawing crowds but disappoints. This Irish memory play tells of a riven family. Kathleen (Carol Moore playing woman and girl) recalls how she wanted to live with her kind, fiddle-playing, publican dad but was transplanted to a posh neighbourhood by her aspirant mum. There's one poignant scene where Kathleen's ma can't appreciate what she has cultivated when her son becomes a concert pianist. That aside, the story is slow-moving and Ian McElhinney's production is a bumpy ride with several crass caricatures.

Over at the Traverse, you can normally rely on quality new plays, but this year it's a roller coaster. Bima and Bramati is a sub-Beckettian dialogue from Oslo where a decrepit duo talk about inching towards the door. I yearned to help them out. Tempting Providence is a pleasant but tame biodrama about Nurse Myra Bennett, the "Florence Nightingale of Newfoundland". Frankly, you'll have more fun with the mock-gothic doctor and disembowelled puppets in The Elephant Woman, a wildly silly spoof presented by Population: 3 at the Pleasance.

When the Bulbul Stopped Singing is more quietly absorbing: a diary by a Palestinian, Raja Shehadeh, adapted by David Greig. This offers a valuable glimpse into the stress and fearfulness of life in Ramallah under Israeli occupation. In Shimmer, Linda McClean's new Scottish play, Petal is the exhausted peacemaker, trying to soothe her squabbling mother and gran, though she's the one dying of cancer.This is rather repetitive and sentimental but Lynne Parker's fine cast are humorous and lyrically tender.

The real corker is Take Me Away - also directed by Parker. In Gerald Murphy's black comedy, which concerns three sniping Irish brothers and their floundering father, each man's happy account of his life is a lie. It can be predictable but the acting is terrific and the conflicts are explosively funny and menacing. Last but not least, in Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters - written and performed by Russell Barr - a drag queen's droll anecdotes about drug-addled escapades in Glasgow are punctuated with sudden long, dark pauses. Gradually you realise all the wit and glitter is stained with memories of a brutal murder. Very sharp.

'Killing Paul McCartney'/ 'Bombshells'/ 'The Blind Fiddler': Assembly Rooms (0131 226 2428); 'Thom Pain'/ 'New Spaces For Role Models'/ 'Nine Days Crazy'/ 'The Elephant Woman': Pleasance (0131 556 6550), to 30 Aug (except 'Nine Days...', to 29 Aug); 'Harry and Me': Gilded Balloon (0131 668 1633), to 30 Aug; 'Bima & Bramati'/ 'Tempting Providence'/ 'When the Bulbul Stopped Singing'/ 'Shimmer'/ 'Take Me Away'/ 'Sisters, Such Devoted Sisters': Traverse (0131 228 1404), to 28 Aug

k.bassett@independent.co.uk