Matthew Highton is a surprising little gem. With his scuzzy, studenty, rock-starish looks, he lopes on stage in the cosy room above The Temple Bar, seeming so much like your average white male twenty-something stand-up. He starts a routine about being hung over – you think so far, so what? – and then, everything shifts.  For here be dragons – and by dragons I mean, a rather more surreal brand of stand up comedy.

In a crown of thorns and an orange jumpsuit, Jesus bounds up to the mic – before revealing that the Catholic mass is all a gag gone wrong.  In performer Abie Philbin Bowman’s parallel world, the Son of God is a stand-up comedian and, as if that wasn’t enough, a recent internee at Guantánamo Bay.  He debates the practicalities of crucifixion, and muses on Sharia law.  And then, just when you think it couldn’t get any riskier… the action shifts to Belfast!

This assignment caught me out of the blue. A passing mention that I wanted to see some experimental theatre and an open slot on FringeGuru's schedule found me sitting on a bus – in some glorious evening light – with a woman dressed as a ship's captain asking me for the sea conditions.  The bus driver was slumped at the wheel, a vampish woman in an eye-patch tottered down the aisle and a jutting-jawed accordion player (in safety goggles) serenaded us.

There’s an air of well-crafted anticipation surrounding the start of this show.  Arriving at Grand Central, the bar which sits beneath the Nightingale Theatre, you’re handed a folder and shown to a table; before long, a man with a waiter’s pad appears.  He’s there to take your order, but it’s not food that’s on the menu… you’re choosing from a smorgasbord of six musical-theatre vignettes, served up as part of Jake Oldershaw’s Intimate History.

There’s no shortage of comedy improv troupes vying for your trade in Brighton, all ready to pick up a shout from the audience and – with no preparation and no conferring – start running with it there and then.  But we have a soft spot for Off The Cuff, a local group we discovered by chance performing at last year’s Fringe.

Yes, yes, we know; the Darwin zeitgeist is just so last year.  But here’s an unusual reason to celebrate the two-hundred-and-first anniversary of the great scientist’s birth: Brighton local John Hinton’s bringing his one-man musical comedy back home, after an acclaimed sell-out run at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Returning for its second successive Fringe, the eccentric variety act which is The Insect Circus is the kind of entertainment you just don’t find elsewhere.  In a brilliantly simple premise, a Victorian travelling insect circus is made real: flies, wasps, beetles and ladybirds are scaled up to human size, to perform a seemingly neverending parade of old-school circus acts under the benign control of a besuited ring-master.

Twitter.  Tapas.  Twenty20 cricket.  For all the best things in life, it seems, there’s a new and snappy alternative.  And for the past couple of years, locally-based White Room Theatre have applied the same concept to Fringe entertainment – serving up a smorgasbord of fun-sized delights up under their inspired Bite-Size banner.

Physical comedy and classical music: two genres you’ll rarely find in the same sentence, let alone on the same stage.  But with their Titanic Show, classical trio Pluck have crafted an almost-unique form of tuneful slapstick, reminiscent of – dare we say it? – those famed musical numbers from the great Morecambe and Wise.

And now, for something completely different.  If you’ve never seen a silent movie with live accompaniment before, you’ve been missing out on a treat; it’s a quaint and curious experience, yes, but one that carries far more than mere retro charm.