Critic and commentators are quick and eager to spot themes at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, but what i’ve noticed in my time up here over the last two weeks is the absence of themes. If you see three offensive shows you can say the theme is offensive comedy, if you see three whimsical shows you can say the theme is whimsical comedy. But I’ve seen around fifty shows in the last two weeks and the theme that strikes me is the sheer diversity of themes. Take these three shows for instance...

Mackenzie Taylor’s No Straightjacket Required (Pleasance Dome) might sound like a Phil Collins tribute act, but the theme here is suicide, which is not something you come across a lot on the Fringe – even though some sets might drive you to the edge. The thoroughly decent, middle class Taylor spends an hour telling his audience how a combination of personal trauma and his bipolar disorder led him to take a potentially lethal cocktail of alcohol and pills. It is an eloquent, touching show finding comedy in the darkest of places. Not always hilarious, but Taylor has an engaging self-deprecating streak. At one point he recalls how when he drove to Brighton to commit suicide he got frustrated because he could not find a parking space. Despite his death wish he didn’t want to get clamped. Taylor has not had many reviews - maybe critics are worried that a bad write-up might push him to the brink again. I’m sure if they saw the show it would get only positive plaudits.

Taylor attempted his suicide at a poetry gig. It was presumably not one featuring Luke Wright (Underbelly), whose verses are positively life enhancing as well as hilarious. A few years ago Wright made a bit of a splash as part of Aisle 16, the world’s first poetry boyband. Like all boybands they split and now the moon-faced rhymer is pursuing a solo career. His latest show allows him to address the things that bug him, which is mostly his own immature, self-obsessed behaviour. In one poem, about wearing Russell Brand-style tight black trousers he reflects on looking like “an apple balancing on a pair of compasses.” Elsewhere the self-confessed Essex-born, Norwich-based young dad reveals that the Guardian has called him a “foppish bufffoon”. There is some pretty, witty, occasionally even profound stuff here, although I’m not sure if it was such a good idea to read out some Phillip Larkin. You don’t get Michael McIntyre doing old Billy Connolly routines mid-set. Anyway, Wright’s career looks like taking off now, but if it doesn’t maybe in a few years he can reunite Aisle 16. Getting back together certainly hasn’t done Take That’s bank balances any harm.

Another show that pushes the boundaries of what goes on at the Fringe is Caroline Mabey’s Go Go Go Coffee Show (Beehive Inn), which is part of the Free Fringe (though there is an optional whip-round at the end). It is a lunchtime show, you get free thimbles of coffee and Mabey is thoroughly enjoyable company. Imagine the slightly deranged offspring of a menage a trois between between Vic Reeves, Harry Hill and Floella Benjamin and you are getting there. There are childlike drawings, singalongs and animations as well as a few flirty, rude and surreal gags, and the whole thing is punctuated by painfully cheesy puns. Mabey has an art school background and I couldn’t work out if the show is some kind of post-Tracey Emin perverse exercise in pyjama-based performance art. But does that really matter when you get complimentary coffee and giggle pretty constantly for an hour? I think not.

If you went on a day trip to Edinburgh and only saw these three shows you’d have a real taste of the Fringe experience away from the hype. You’d also have plenty of change left over from £30, which cannot be bad.