Laughter is a personal business. So it's in the interests of offering a balanced view that I report Count Arthur Strong's Forgotten Egypt is a work of comic genius; Britain's greatest contribution to world culture since The Beatles - although it tends to leave a portion of the audience stone-temple cold.
There are no concessions here - you either get it or you don't. But this is surely the most fully formed comic character since Alan Partridge: a creaky, ill-tempered actor with a booze problem, poor syntax, delusions of grandeur and an on-off relationship with reality.
No light is shed on Count Arthur's precarious psychological state, but it's this opacity that gives the act its charge. Steve Delaney is literally possessed by his character as he bakes falafels, bawls out his sound girl, and valiantly struggles to articulate the word 'articulation'.
Forgotten Egypt offers a thrilling but accessible sense of the bizarre, rooted in entertainment culture, and some incredibly funny set-pieces. It reprises a little of his equally brilliant previous show (with comic Terry Titter) You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet, but with at least two new Count Arthur classics: the Rex Harrison medley, and the routine with Little Tiny King Tut, the mummified ventriloquist's doll. It's too idiosyncratic to be perfect, but who cares - this is the real deal, comedy in thrall to nothing except its own glorious inventiveness.
Until Aug 26, Gilded Balloon, 233 Cowgate, 5.45pm, £7 and £8, £6 and £7 concs.
