This year's comedy debutants are a mixed bunch, discovers , but it wouldn't be the Fringe if they were all as slick as Michael McIntyre

Gareth Richards is a case in point. Smartly turned out in a shirt, tie and jacket, he comes over as a chirpy car salesman: confident but you can never quite trust his patter. He intersperses his observational routines on death and fatherhood with semi-ironic comic songs played on a battered Omnichord. He has a couple of decent one liners and has made a stab at writing a properly structured show but it all lacks conviction. Richards would make a decent game show host but a nominee for the best comedy newcomer of 2010?

A more convincing candidate is Imran Yusuf, a Mombasa-born Muslim who was schooled in the United States but lives in the East End of London. For his first Edinburgh show, the 24-year-old delivers a heartfelt, passionate hour on identity, assimilation, religion and stereotypes. Not the traditional stomping grounds of stand-up. Other comedians have flirted around the edges of these subjects but Yusuf dives right into the big questions. Is he a British Muslim or a Muslim living in Britain? What happens when a Muslim asks questions about his faith? What fuels racism or religious intolerance? Yusuf gives very personal answers to all of these and more without preaching. His show is more profound than most and positive without being po-faced. It is not the funniest hour on the Fringe but it has a perfectly decent gag rate that sits happily with the seriousness of the topics covered. Constantly flipping audience expectations, playing on prejudice and confounding stereotypes, Yusuf delivers an accomplished Fringe debut.

He didn't make the shortlist but Nick Helm should have been a top contender for the newcomer nominations. A big, bearded, volatile, bruiser of a man (think Justin Lee Collins with anger control issues), his Keep Hold Of The Gold show demonstrates that when life gives you lemons it makes you feel better if you scream in life's face. Helm's volume level rarely strays below that of an enthusiastic Brian Blessed and his confrontational manner won't be to everyone's taste but, as a back story about his broken love life unfolds, there is a terrible, tragic vulnerability to his foam-flecked rants. Underneath the inventive swearing, audience-baiting and stalker love songs, there is a well honed set of comic techniques at work. It's raw, bracing and a hundred more times involving than a conventional stand-up gig.

Paul Foot is another comedian, albeit a much more established one, who flouts the conventions of stand-up. His show this year has been directed by Noel Fielding of The Boosh fame and that sprinkling of stardust has attracted a more mainstream-sized crowd than Foot usually draws.

Not that the increased attention has seen him dilute his absurdist brand of humour. Homophobic shire horses, a golliwog guest star (brought on to discuss racism) and a skeleton barbecue held on the Isle of the Dead are his main topics of ramble but they could be anything. It doesn't matter because, with Foot, the medium is the message or, more accurately, the mirth is in the medium. His gangling frame and Eastern Bloc hairstyle help his flamboyant physical clowning but it's his sheer, mischievous enjoyment of surreal but neatly written nonsense that wins the day and will also probably prevent him from entering the wider public conscious.

Despite his Irish Iranian Teesider roots, Patrick Monahan is a more straight down the line observational stand-up. Most of his show is a mix of run-of-the-mill crowd banter and banal riffing on regional differences; his less than startling conclusion being that southerners are rich and soft while northerners are poor, hard and shop at Lidl. Monahan does it with warmth and charm but it's the bog standard, bread and butter material of 1,000 club circuit nights. At the very end of his show, Monahan begins to explore what it was like growing up in 1980s Teeside with parents whose nationalities were synonymous with extremism. It's a tantalising glimpse of more intriguing possibilities but he almost throws it away in the rush to get to a crowd-pleasing, admittedly feel good dance finale. This show does the job but you can't help but feel that it could have been so much better.

By the time you read this, the world will know whether or not Stewart Lee has succeeded in subverting the first Comic God award to be awarded by the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. Fosters, the sponsors, will be hoping that an easily recognisable, mainstream comic like Michael McIntyre will have won. Lee has tried to sabotage such a result by suggesting it would be better should the avant garde, Japanese act The Frank Chickens would be more deserving winners.

I hope Lee is right. Not because of any hostility towards commercial sponsorship or the concept of judging one comedian against another. It's just that acts like Yusuf, Foot, Helm or indeed the Frank Chickens may be more challenging than comics like McIntyre, but they are much more representative of the classic Fringe comedy experience through the years. v

Gareth Richards, Pleasance Courtyard, until tomorrow at 6pm; Imran Yusuf, Laughing Horse at Espionage, until tomorrow at 4.30pm; Nick Helm, Downstairs at the Tron, final show today at 3.40pm; Paul Foot, Underbelly, final show today at 7.40pm; Patrick Monahan, Gilded Balloon Teviot, until tomorrow at 9pm