As the Edinburgh Fringe reaches its final few days the 39th So You Think You’re Funny? final was a fitting way of spotting potential stars of the future. The likes of Aisling Bea, Maisie Adam, Peter Kay, Lee Mack and Romesh Ranganathan have previously come through the ranks. Chances are that a few of the ten finalists this year will eventually be household names.

 

First up was Joshua Khoury, who set a very high benchmark for others to match with his oddball take on the world. I'm not sure if the lanky Australian needed to say that he was weird, he could have let his material do the talking. He loves books so much, he said, that he licks his finger after he turns the page. He had a good eye for a striking image, comparing the Human Centipede to shopping trolleys bunching together.

 

Next up was Naph, a muslim comedian performing in a hijab. It was one of those quirks of Fringe-going that just before the final the last show I'd seen was Edinburgh Comedy Award Best Newcomer Award nominee Fatiha El Ghorri, who must be the most famous Hijab-wearing stand-up in the country right now. Naph had a very different style though. Very static and deadpan, but her jokes weren't as strong as her charisma. There was a nice line about "rearranged" marriages but also reference to Jeremy Kyle, which felt past its tell-by date. Plenty of promise but not there yet.

 

After you've been at the Fringe for three weeks themes do start to emerge. Matilda Humphreys opened by explaining that she had recently been diagnosed with polycistic ovaries and was on testosterone. El Ghorri had also talked about taking testosterone and the effect it had on her moods, though Humphreys had a very winning line on the kind of inappropriate things the drug makes her say. Another act to file under 'potential'.

 

Chris Byfield had some intriguing hinterland with a dad that runs a crematorium, but too often he went for an easy take on things. A gag about who he resembled – straggly black hair and beard – didn't quite land for me. He was better when he took risks, as with a different suggestion on how to stop kids accessing online porn. I think we'll be hearing more from Byfield but he was not consistent enough to get a placing tonight.

 

Sara Dungworth, now there's a comedy name to conjure with, closed the first half with an amiable set about being childfree – sometimes pithy but not always. I could see a gag about not pissing herself on a trampoline a mile away. She is a teacher and her best line actually came from one of her kids who described farting as being like his bum laughing. If she keeps using it I hope he gets a writer's credit. 

 

If I'm honest the first half didn't throw up anyone as impressive as the opening act, but the standard went up a few notches after the interval with Bobby Jethro, another name that sounded made up for the night. Jethro had a stammer and, whether by accident or design, the pauses before his punchlines actually made them so much funnier. His material was very good too. He had previously worked in a call centre - so odd it must've surely been true. He was an instant hit with the crowd and as one of the judges I thought he might even win, but was placed second.

 

Victoria Blunt was another of a number of nice but lightly smutty white middle class-looking women on the bill (the men mostly seemed white middle class, tall and lanky – I'm not just judging the women here). She was nicely self-deprecating though, joking about her age, her Uber rating and her acting career – you might have seen her as a paramedic in The Diplomat as long as you didn't blink. She is also hard of hearing (a theme this year, two Comedy Award nominees wear hearing aids) which means safe words can be an issue for her, but a funny punchline for us.

 

Lucas Jones Ho made the most of his mixed parentage - you don't get many Welsh/Chinese stand-ups and he skilfully both played up to and subverted stereotypes. A lengthy rhyming routine about an epithet for being Chinese was funny enough not be be construed as racist and helped to land him joint third place. I wouldn't dream of calling him Lucas Jones Ho Ho Ho. 

 

After a few female comics who were good but not quite distinctive enough, Sarah Lewis was a blast of fresh air with a short, thoughtful set about gender, how men have always lacked emotional intelligence but maybe are finally latching on to how important it is when trying to communicate. This was a set more about ideas than punchy pay-offs – of all the acts in the final I'd be most interested in seeing Lewis do a full length show.She shared third place on the night.

 

Omar Bouzad closed the show with a set that had bags of energy but gags that felt a little stale. After a notable opening about the similarity between lesbians and suicide bombers and a promising routine about gender, noticing how we've gone from Gameboy to Nintendo Switch, he had a riff about moving the TV aerial around to get ITV that even Peter Kay might have rejected for being old hat. The young people in the audience probably thought he was referring to a character in the Little Mermaid. 

 

Well done for compere Laura Lexx for keeping the energy flowing throughout the night. In the end the judges decided that nobody was quite as good as Joshua Khoury, who collected the top prize. Who knows, maybe in a decade he'll be doing an ad asking what has the BBC ever done for me? For now So You Think you're Funny? has set him on the path to stardom.