This is my third year coming up to Edinburgh and by now I've found my secret weapon: fruit smoothies, laced with plenty of ginger. I bring a smoothie-making machine up to the Fringe with me and I assign my survival to it, entirely. I also give up smoking for the month – I'm constantly giving up smoking – and stop drinking, or at least massively cut down. Inevitably it ends up slipping.

Ross Sutherland's debut show melds stand-up, satire and sinuous verse, making the 29-year-old spoken-word artist one of the most exciting new voices to emerge on the Fringe this year. The Three Stigmata of Pacman is loosely the tale of his quarter-life crisis, a journey from music journalist in Manchester to destitute wannabe poet living with his parents in Essex.

Humphrey Ker, David Reed & Thom Tuck...

The test of an afternoon Edinburgh show is whether it could play an evening slot. Afternoon hours always have an air of audience hesitancy about them, but are likely to be given the benefit of the doubt; evening shows are more exposed to the lust for a punchline. Jess Ransom's multi-character adventure would narrowly fail this litmus test, but not without amassing some brownie points along the way.

"Clamped together like limpets" they were, said campaigning journalist Marjorie Wallace, who told the story of "the silent twins", June and Jennifer Gibbons, diagnosed as "elective mutes", in a book and a television documentary.

This year I've done three things differently from any other year I've been at the Fringe:

Continuing its theme of the clash of cultures between the Old and New Worlds, the Edinburgh International Festival has co-produced a rarity, Montezuma, by the 18th-century German Carl Heinrich Graun, with a libretto by his employer, King Frederick II of Prussia.

This is my third experience of the Fringe (technically it's the fourth but the first time I went I was still in the music business, and I had no idea comedy existed). My brain is such that I can rarely learn more than a lesson a year so, for anyone following in my footsteps, here are three lessons I won't forget.

You could probably read the entire novel in the time it takes for New York's Elevator Repair Service to present Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the opening theatre show in the Edinburgh International Festival. Some of the episodes from the story – laconically narrated from within the action by the journalist Jake Barnes (Mike Iveson) – could easily have been cut. But in searching out "the play within the story" – as the director John Collins describes the process involved in devising this version – the company has made a brilliantly inventive marriage between words, music and an array of sound effects, and also between sharp characterisation, movement and choreography.

In the spirit of a show whose title alludes to Columbo, let me do first what old-school American detective-shows did best, the summation: 31-year-old radio and TV presenter Alex Zane is a nice enough bloke whose comedy shtick doesn't seem to have come on since his early success, aged 18, in the Fringe-based So You Think You're Funny? competition. Case closed.

I first visited Edinburgh in 1988, playing a small role in an obscure Jacobean tragedy set, like so many before and since, in an office. Each afternoon I'd perch on top of a filing cabinet and overact to an empty auditorium, after which I was free to head off and watch productions of Huis Clos and The Caucasian Chalk Circle set, more often than not, in offices.

Sustaining a one-liner oriented show for an hour or more is a tricky business. Even the best practitioners, like Jimmy Carr and Steven Wright, have found it a stretch.

The troubled US singer-songwriter Loretta Maine was the star character of British comedian Pippa Evans's 2008 award-nominated show, and thus the best bet for a solo showcasing. Choosing Maine was not only wise but another sign that, despite its previously much maligned status, musical comedy is very much in the ascendant. You could easily see Maine wailing her woes in an episode of Flight of the Conchords, the show that has done much to bring about this comedic sea change.