Edinburgh Fringe: Jason Cook/ Cul de Sac/ Fear of a Brown Planet

Jason Cook has masterly audience skills, and he needed them all the night I saw him. A middle-aged teacher (who really should know better), whose refreshment clearly led her to the delusion that she was the person people had paid to see, kept interrupting. Even the engaging and unfailingly polite Geordie comic's patience was wearing thin, but he constantly bested her and got on with the job of making us laugh.

The Search for Happiness isn't as high-concept Cook's previous Fringe outings, but no less enjoyable for that because can make a room happy just by chatting - the gags follow naturally. He breaks the thesis down into five components and tells a few stories along the way, about our place in society - he's particularly good about the difference between the friends he and his wife, currently studying for a PhD, have – racist taxi drivers and the healing power of dinner ladies' bosoms.

As ever, Cook's mother makes a welcome appearance in his material, and she tells it like it is; talking about Jesus, she says, “It got a bit shitty in the end.” Despite some old material popping up, and a tendency to analyse his act while performing it - and even with an idiot in the crowd - he showed he's a great entertainer whose laugh quotient is always high. Until 29 August

Middle-aged Londoner Tim (Alan Francis) moves with his wife and teenage daughter into what he thinks is a quiet middle-class enclave of a cul-de-sac (presumably in the Home Counties), where his daughter can get on with her studies and gain the place at Oxbridge he so dearly desires for her.

But things are not as they seem; the family dog dies at the hands of next-door neighbour Nigel (Mike Hayley), who witters on about Tony from across the road. Through their conversations and consultations with local GP Dr Cole (Toby Longworth) we learn that Tony, despite looking like “a Maltese pimp” has a curious hold over everyone in the cul-de-sac – women, men, even dogs. When Nigel's wife moves in with Tony, taking his beloved pooch, he comments admiringly, “I've never seen his coat look so glossy!”

There are several good lines and a nice running gag about Nigel's ear in Matthew Osborn's play, directed by Maggie Inchley for Comedians Theatre Company, but its brevity means Tim's transformation re Tony comes too suddenly. And it's all rather predictably “beneath the cosy middle-class exterior lies a dark underbelly of menace”; it's described as a male Stepford Wives, but it reminded me more of the excellent Channel 5 series Suburban Shootout. It is, though, an enjoyable hour with a great cast. Until 29 August

Nazeem Hussain and Aamer Rahman are two Muslim comics from Australia, who each perform 25 minutes of stand-up in this two-header. Their mission is to explain to white people what it's like to be brown-skinned in the post-9/11 world, and they each come on to a series of video clips from news programmes about Gaza and the Norway massacre, and films and television shows such as Star Trek, in which the baddies are always of Middle Eastern appearance.

Hussain suggests the only reason “white countries” such as England (hmm, don't know about you, but one of the things I love about England is that it is a thriving multicultural nation) win medals at the Commonwealth Games is because they spend millions of dollars on sport – would that were the case. And actually India was second in the medals table in 2010 (England third), but best not to let the facts get in the way of a feeble joke.

Rahman goes for a more surreal approach, imagining a scenario in which humans could time travel and bring a laser cannon back to the time when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas, but because someone forgot to charge it up they had to go back to bows and arrows.

I'm all for one's smug liberal assumptions being pricked by comedy, but Hussain and Rahman utterly fail to bring intelligent debate or astute analysis to their material. Neither is a decent enough comic to write funny gags about being stopped at airports, living in a deeply racist country or coming from immigrant stock, and they aren't above getting a cheap laugh by mimicking Asian accents in an exaggerated fashion.

Oh, and banning alcohol from their venue when they are not strictly observing Ramadan themselves smacks of the same cultural arrogance they appear to see everywhere else. Until 29 August

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