More ambitious characters such as the anorakish Biscuit Collector struggle to maintain the show’s momentum.Perrier Award exposure may open up new vistas for the Joyrider but where then? Long is the way of the pun, and hard.Pleasance (Venue 33) To 30 Aug (not tonight) (0131-556 6550). In the middle of her deliciously tongue-in-cheek lecture demonstration, song (and hair) stylist Jackie Clune hits you with the hitherto hidden truth. At their best, Jones’s deliberate, precisely weighted one-liners give his most appealing characters a curious kind of integrity. Still, the laconic Jones has ploughed his lonely comedy furrow to considerable success, not least a Perrier nomination. Tonight, the pun, that flighty mistress, is as fickle as ever.

Selfless devotion to the art of the pun is usually rewarded with a one-way ticket to pro-celebrity golf tournaments. John heads towards a gun-toting showdown with the drug dealer he holds responsible for the death of his son, but this seems to have more to do with giving the bloated plot a crack of the whip than exploring the rugged individualism so sentimentalised on screen. The flaws in his character (the domestic violence, adultery) feel more like inconsistencies than thought-provoking ambiguities.
The action may keep you watching, but it kicks up too much dust, obscuring glimpses of a community whose environment is so neglected that survival requires daily acts of true grit.Traverse (Venue 15) To 30 Aug (0131-228 1404). What’s worse – she can prove it.”More downhome sweetness than an entire series of The Waltons.Arj Barker is at the Pleasance (0131-556 6550) to 30 Aug. Though it has an interesting conceit – summoning up the spirit of the Wild West in a modern-day urban ghetto – Nicola McCartney’s play for LookOut Theatre never allows these two world to collide in any particularly insightful way in its law-enforcing central character.

“Wayne was what he was paid to be – a legend – and that’s good enough for me,” says John, an ex-copper whose drab existence on an imploding housing estate in the west of Scotland is spiced up by watching TV westerns, dressing up like his cowboy heroes for line-dancing sessions – and partaking in a spot of vigilantism. The closest this young American comes to radicalism is dimming the lights to write a complaining letter to last night’s audience.
But he demonstrates that there is still a place for a funny one-liner and that you don’t have to dress up as a fading showbiz legend to deliver it.Barker laments that: “I’m in love with a philosopher and she doesn’t even know I exist. And winning the Perrier Award for best newcomer into the bargain

Arj Barker is a refreshingly old-fashioned talent. If they ever introduce a GCSE in “the nature of body fascism”, this might have a future as a theatre-in-education piece It certainly doesn’t work as a play

Assembly Rooms (Venue 3) To 30 Aug (0131-226 2428). Straight stand-up is in danger of drowning in a sea of novelty acts.

So much so that it’s almost a surprise to see one man and his mike making observations about the Tube and Boots. In one of several arch and obvious historical digressions, a prisoner in the Bastille finds his libido flagging because he’s not allowed to remove his mask to have sex. A soldier disfigured by a grenade is rejected by his fiancee. Two men fight over a face that one has “stolen” from the other. Other cultures have it too, he points out, especially in India and China where health care involves balancing the energies which according to these cultures flow through the body’s meridians (energy channels) via the chakras (major distribution channels).Michael O’Doherty, an equally fervent and rapid-fire talker from county Clare (where the actor Michael York attends his Ennis clinic) later tells me that bio-energy – which simply means life force – can be photographed and measured electrically, while its existence has been tacitly accepted by the World Health Organisation (who acknowledged the effectiveness of acupuncture in 1979). This is a scientific therapy, he argues; faith healing without the faith, to “free up” energy blockages.”Einstein concluded that everything is energy, and beyond that is intelligence,” he says.