HOW MANY comedy acts does it take to make a festival? According to the official Fringebrochure,theanswerisa whopping 657, and that's no joke. With stand-up comedians swarming all over Edinburgh vying for an if.comeddies nomination, you could be forgiven for thinking that there is simply no room for the good old-fashioned comic play. Yet this August has seen proof positive that theatrical comedy is alive and well.

If you hung around any venue this year you were almost guaranteed to hear someone singing the praises of The Walworth Farce, the latest play by Irish writer Enda Walsh.

Set in a high-rise block on the Walworth Road, southeast London, the play finds three Irishmen - thepsychopathic,middle-agedDinnyandtwo youngermen,SeanandBlake,whoarepurportedly his sons - living in an advanced stage of squalor.

Apart from Sean's brief trips to Tesco, they are confined to their putrid flat, where they act out, at Dinny's menacing insistence, a crazed play set backinCorkCity;despiteincludingafreakspeedboataccidentinvolvingasealion,itis supposedly the true story of how the three came to leave Ireland.

Brilliantly ambiguous and darkly hilarious, the play overflows with the kind of intelligent satirethathascharacterisedmuchof Ireland's greattheatretradition,fromJMSyngeto Martin McDonagh today. Whether it is Sean complaining of the pain in his "hole" (he supposedly impaled himself on a set of railings as a child) or Bing Crosby's sentimentalAnIrishLullabyplayingonadecrepitcassettemachine,the rapid-fire comedy of the production is breathtaking.

Thefour-strongcastgivesimmense performances on a fabulous, hyper-real set. Denis Conway's explosive,muscularplaying of Dinny mightjustbethebestperformanceinEdinburghthis summer.

IfWalsh'splaycamerecommendedbypedigree,mostpunters went to see Jihad: The Musicalinaspiritof trepidationmorethan excitement.

In a festival which hasahistoryofoutrageouslycontroversialperformers attemptingdesperatelytograbthe attentionofthe payingpublic,it seemeddistinctly possiblethatthismightjustbethemost offensiveshowonrecord.

In fact, this piece by New York's Zoe Samuel (book and lyrics) and Ben Scheuer (music and lyrics) is a brilliant and brave satire which refuses to flip over into cheap jokes at the expense of Islam. Set in Afghanistan and the United States, the show is a relentlessly witty assault on al-Qaeda, US foreign policy and the American news media.

The superb Sorab Wadia (who plays al-Qaeda leader Hussein Al-Mansour) leads a brilliant cast. The combination of his tremendous performance and the hilariously politically incorrect "Burkettes" (a chorus line of dancers in pink, shimmering burkas) has shot the song I Wanna Be Like Osama to fame on YouTube (with more than 140,000 hits as the Sunday Herald went to press).

As with the show as a whole, the YouTube video is like a cross between Mel Brooks's The Producers and Monty Python's The Life Of Brian. Is it offensive to Muslims? I'd be more offended by Jihad: The Musical if I was French.

If the pick of the theatrical comedies were new shows, the Comedy Theatre of Bucharest arrived midway through the festival to remind us that the best comedy is timeless. In their production of Gogol'sclassicsatiricalfarceTheGovernment Inspector, they present a masterclass in comic ensemble theatre.

The "great and the good" of a small Russian town mistake a pauperised visitor for the titular official fromMoscow,lavishinghimwithhospitality (including sex with the Mayor's daughter; a comic highlight of this production). Playing the terror-stricken, self-seeking town leaders, the ensemble moves as one, like a boat on a tempestuous sea. They generate an extraordinary sense of collective madness.

Highly professional and wonderfully clownish, this piece is performed in an ensemble style which we in Britain, with our more individualistic acting culture, see all too rarely. It is a timely reminder that there is a lot more to comedy than simply standing in front of a microphone telling jokes.

The Walworth Farce ends at Traverse 1 today. Jihad: The Musical ends at C Venue tomorrow.

The Government Inspector ends at Assembly Universal Arts tomorrow