You must go and see this show. Immediately.

Such was the mirth at Adam Riches’ show, one audience member’s bowels were audibly loosened. Not your reviewer, I hasten to add, but someone in the Pleasance crowd, which had been whipped to near hysteria.

This is, once again, the best sketch show on the fringe and the funniest thing I have seen this year.

Bring Me The Head Of Adam Riches is powered along by the star’s boundless energy and warped imagination. It’s the best kind of fun; massive silliness delivered dead straight by someone slightly scary.

There are some swears but an uptight grandparent would love this as much as a 12-year-old. That kind of universality normally rings the bland alarm, but that’s not the case here.

Audience members found themselves doing things with lizards and Daniel Day-Lewis they never would have imagined. It’s impossible not to be swept along in the show and I saw many eyes being dried from early on.

In the first week of the Fringe it’s not uncommon to see a dour, unimpressible local sat glowering at the front. One such doughy curmudgeon was sat on the front row and obviously took very little pleasure in life. But with the brazen charm and relentlessness of Lord Byron driving a steamroller Riches won her over. She was beaming by the end, and it might even have been her who’s other aperture expressed the merriment I referred to earlier.

You should go and see it soon because it’s brilliant (don’t sit on the front two rows if you’ve a fear of participation) but also because:

• Riches has the demented charisma of Errol Flynn with a head injury and will soon be a star

• This show will soon be sold out for the rest of its run, much like his 2008, 2009 and 2010 shows

• His voice surely can’t take a whole month of Daniel Day-Lewis acting

• Daniel Day-Lewis’s lawyers might soon sue the Pleasance and Riches for defamation

• A month of receiving water “as starlings do” might give him a serious communicable disease

• A month of being hurled into the audience by the audience could see him make more use of the show’s wheelchair

5 stars

Bring Me the Head of Adam Riches is on at 4.45pm at the Pleasance Courtyard.

Review written by Ben Clover