Carey Marx, Gilded Balloon ****

Carey Marx couldn't come to the Fringe last year, because of the small matter of having a heart attack. But, looking on the bright side, the experience has given him his new show, Intensive Carey, in which the comic tells his story without a trace of self-pity and with a keen sense of the absurd.

Gyles Brandreth, Pleasance Courtyard ***

This is an agreeable hour of theatre and political anecdotes that former MP and now BBC presenter Gyles Brandreth tells with great aplomb. He drops a lot of names, but he's very good mimic – John Gielgud, Frank Sinatra, Prince Charles and others make an appearance – and the stories (whether wholly true or not) are very funny.

Rubberbandits embody that modern entertainment industry phenomenon – a huge YouTube hit who have moved into the mainstream with ease. The prankster hip hop duo – Mr Chrome and Blindboy Boatclub (aka Bob McGlynn and Dave Chambers) – have notched up more than 25 million hits online and now routinely sell out their energetic live shows, which they perform as if music gigs.

Mel Smith, who has died at the age of 60, will be principally remembered as one quarter of the satirical sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News and one half of its blokier spin-off Alas Smith and Jones. A natural and inclusive comedian, it’s less widely recalled that Smith also directed one of the most successful films in British movie history: Bean. As co-founder with Griff Rhys Jones of Talkback, he was also a pioneer in independent television production. When they sold the company, Smith became a millionaire many times over.

The Meltdown Festival has always been a fascinating proposition, getting a living legend in their field to curate their own personal festival line-up, and present all of their idiosyncratic choices to London in the refined and retro-futuristic surroundings of the Royal Festival Hall.

Equal parts prodigiously talented musician, consistently funny comedian, auteur, theatre performer, free thinker and writer, Reggie Watts is nigh on impossible to pigeonhole. He is a hurricane of furious creativity operating completely in his own lane, hurtling full-speed towards Parts Unknown. Primarily known for his inimitable blend of improvisational music and comedy, each show he performs is completely original, never to be repeated.

The idea of the celeb as fictional life coach is not new. In Play It Again, Sam Humphrey Bogart dispenses tips on wooing to Woody Allen’s schlemiel. Eric Cantona offers gnomic pearls to a put-upon Man U fan in Looking for Eric. And then there’s the altogether more category-resistant Being John Malkovich. But they’re all up on the big screen. Luisa Omielan consults her chosen heroine for therapeutic guidance right there in front of you onstage, and a hilarious, life-affirming, mood-enhancing job she makes of it.

There's a quite a contrast between the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena in 1993 where, with the help of his erstwhile writing and performing partner David Baddiel, Rob Newman “invented” comedy as rock 'n' roll, and tonight's venue, a bijou children's puppet theatre seating 100 patrons. But then Newman - Robert Newman to those who buy his novels - is doing rather different comedy these days.

Ventriloquism, once a staple of music hall and variety theatre, has rather gone out of fashion. More mature readers - or students of the form - may be familiar with names such as Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, Shari Lewis and Lambchop or Ray Alan and Lord Charles, but they are all decades gone from our stages and television screens. Nina Conti is now one of just a few vent acts to have a popular following, and she's reinventing the form.

Aware I was going to see a stand-up comedian at the Brighton Festival but not knowing much about Daniel Kitson, the opening of his new show, After The Beginning, Before The End, bemused. On he wandered, shaven bald of head, geeky, bearded, wearing specs and a librarian-style brown jacket. He sat in a nondescript red chair at a small table with a cup of tea and pressed buttons on an electronic gizmo which began to burble sweet abstract electro bleeps. Then he went into a monologue which ceased an hour and 40 minutes later.