RHYS JAMES: BEGINS

PLEASANCE COURTYARD (VENUE 33)

COMEDY AFTER last year’s 45-minute dry run on the Free Festival,

Rhys James: Prepares, comes this almost too textbook debut from the prodigiously talented 23-year-old. Eminently aware of his place in the comedy firmament, as a painfully young-looking, physically unimpressive wordsmith with pretensions to poetic acclaim and a unique selling point of possessing only one kidney, James opens with a very funny film satirising the process of bringing a show to Edinburgh.

That it’s slick and features a host of upcoming comics playing airhead publicists in swanky offices, establishes a sense of knowing self-awareness, destiny and entitlement that remains ever-present. James quips amusingly about his father’s fitness for employment. Yet he himself appears to have been developed, slightly wonkily, in a comedian test tube, with a developed sense of joke structure, battery of clever lines and requisite history of awkwardness with the opposite sex, bordering on stalking.

Actually, that’s not quite fair, as having put this girl on a pedestal, he embraces his pretentious side instead, and in his artful, spoken-word verse he has a flair that genuinely sets him apart, projects an organic reality and injects an energy missing from the neatly honed craft and comedy incestuous elsewhere. With a ready riposte for the older stand-ups who dismiss his insight into “issues” and the critic who dared sneer at his poetry, he (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) reasons he needs a niche, and suggests he’s found it with his kidney angle.

A compelling lead-in to his stand-up origin story, borne of humiliation at school, it serves to further humanise a performer who appears so assured and writes so well, capable of exploding the class divisions riven through Trivial Pursuit.

JAY RICHARDSON

Until 24 August. Today 4:45pm.