Ania Magliano (Pleasance Courtyard, five stars) has the full set. She has been on Taskmaster, she is one of the breakout stars of SNL UK and now she has a superb stand-up show under her belt (although, I should add, her previous shows have all been pretty good). In Peach Fuzz she explores body image, in particular her own body image. And in very particular, her genitalia.

 

I doubt if it was a plant but to make things even funnier than they already were, just as she moved onto a routine about a woman who had 27 orgasms – not in a year or a week, but in a day – she glanced to her left and spotted a 14-year-old boy in the front row. Not that she held back but he certainly got an education as she explained how her therapist advised her to buy a suitable mirror and get to know her own genitalia. Add that to a riff about the pros and cons of a big labia (is that singular or plural, I didn't want to google it), some thoughts about sexual positions for Barbies and some nostalgia about Sylvanian Families – and lots more, expertly delivered – and you've got a finely honed winning show from a truly charismatic star comedian.

 

After Magliano it was a bit of a comedown to see Freya Parker (Underbelly, three stars), of sketch double act Lazy Susan with SNL UK's Celeste Dring and striking out on her own here. Parker's set was also very much about being a woman and in this case homed in on how she felt she was approaching middle age and sensing encroaching invisibility. 

 

At times the material just felt a little too predictable. No longer being ID'd in shops, no longer being the youngest in the room, entering her years when her favourite shop is Screwfix. Her opening gambit about sharing a name with a porn star would slot snugly into a Venn Diagram next to comedian Lilly Phillips' patter about her perma-bonking namesake. This was perfectly assured stand-up that clearly hit the right notes for some members of the audience, but after Magliano's tour de force felt slightly flat. 

 

Frankie Thompson (Pleasance, four stars) really is one in a million. Her show, Horrible Things, is like nothing else you'll see on the Fringe this year, even though, by an uncanny coincidence, she also does a lot of lip-syncing like Elf Lyons. But Thompson takes things to truly unexpected places, using found sound clips to reenact, for example Jacob Rees-Mogg as a nauseatingly precocious child. It's performance art, it's clowning, it's multi-media. It contains multitudes.

 

I'm guessing Rees Mogg is one of the titular Horrible Things, but you never quite know with Thompson. She once did a show referencing the musical Cats, which I thought was about the musical Cats, until I later concluded it was about queerness and body image. Elsewhere in this show she rampages through the audience with a bubble gun, press-gangs men to dance with her, gets a group of women to mime playing instruments onstage and reflects on the nature of regret via the oeuvre of Frank Sinatra and a selection of hats. So who knows what Thompson is on about thias time. It's certainly never dull.

 

Stuart Goldsmith (Monkey Barrel, four stars) has been coming to Edinburgh for 32 years so it's no surprise that he seems totally at home onstage. He has changed his style recently though. In the last few years he has carved out a distinctive niche for himself as a climate comedian, preaching the gospel of Greta to audiences. As he quips at the start of Canary, he can't lose – if you laugh it's a comedy, if you don't it's a talk. His aim is to nudge people in the direction of fighting against climate change. Whatever you do, he says, just do that little bit more. It all helps.

The title of the show, Canary, a reference to the birds that miners took down shafts and would be the first to die if there was deadly gas present. Goldsmith tells an amazing story about the reality behind this, making it all the more intriguing. He also talks about his own eco-efforts. It's not easy being green – even Goldsmith flies to give talks about the subject, but as he argues, it's better to fly and give talks about the subject than not talk about it at all. He also has a very funny line about hot air balloons. There's certainly no hot air in this show which is tight and to the point, even if he teeters, at times, on the cusp of smugness. 

 

The Edinburgh Fringe deserves a local hero and this year – just like last year and maybe the year before that – it looks like Connor Burns (Just the Tonic Nucleus, four stars) who has been building up a real head of steam through a mix of word of mouth and social media rather than TV, selling shedloads of tickets and adding extra dates. He played to a packed house, mostly Scots but not all, and everyone in the room left smiling.

 

He gets increasingly confident every year. This show FLOW opened with more of a rock and roll vibe with a DJ onstage and flashing lights on Burns' entry. He has plenty of pithy material about Scotland's recent all-too-brief World Cup appearance. It has come to something, he quipped, when you are trying to work out how badly your team can lose and still get through to the next round.

 

Elsewhere there were relatable observations about his country's increasingly-stringent drinking laws, the etiquette of using phones in gym changing rooms and an extended story about losing his luggage on a flight, complete with act outs and accents which he knows full well are dodgy but can't resist doing them. Burns is clearly a comic on the rise. Not groundbreaking, but who cares, he's always crowdpleasing. He's big now but will clearly be getting even bigger.