Don’t get me wrong, the Fringe is the best culture festival in the world. But it’s also an Alien-style mass hatching ground for future Mock the Week panellists who, given half the chance, will sneak up on you, plaster themselves over your eyeballs and violently force their way down your gullet.

To cut through the scuttling scrum for eyeballs and eardrums, performers venture further and further into both the avant-garde and the offensive, devising ever more unusual subjects, daft show names and experimental concepts. Some of it is brilliant. Some of it is shite. A lot of it sounds like an in-joke from The Mighty Boosh. Improvised comedy in the style of Jane Austen? An absurdist collective that dances badly to exaggerated French music? Both genuine shows at this year’s Fringe.

So, after extensive trawling, here are the 10 most ridiculous, pretentious and downright weird-sounding shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2014.

1. The Importance of Being Earnest as Performed by Three F*cking Queens and a Duck

“Three camp, hammy actors defile Mr Wilde’s classic.” By the theatre company behind The Adventures of Buttboy & Tigger.

2. Mrs. Thundercünts’s Sploodge Adventures

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that, despite the jaunty name, this one isn’t actually family-friendly.

3. The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman he Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union

Kind of like Gravity, but with a really wanky title.

4. Smells Like Shite… Tastes Like Chicken

“Basically in a nutshell, Smells Like Shite…Tastes Like Chicken can best be described as the verbal re-enactment  of two broken down dogs trying to work an analogue clock in a digital age.” Glad we got that one cleared up, then.

5. Julius Caesar in Original Pronunciation

Because who doesn’t want to watch a bunch of Texan students painfully attempt to recreate a lost 16^th Century English accent in a play about Romans?

6. Awkward Conversations with Animals I’ve F*cked

You’ll be relieved to learn that this is a one man show…

7. Love is a Cat Skin Rug

“A girl is trapped in trapped in a dark room. A man arranges fruits in order of size. Ten cats die to make a single rug. And two girls ponder the timeworn question… what is love?” I’ll just leave you to digest that one.

8. Kunt and the Gang go to Mecca 

A jolly bit of fatwa-baiting from the much-loved musical comedy star that brought you “Use My Arsehole As a Cunt”

9. The Seussification of a Midsummer Night’s Dream

Yeah, it was probably hilarious when you were stoned in your dorm room at 4am but it really, really, won’t be funny in front of an actual fucking paying audience. I promise.

10. Adrienne Triscott’s Asking for It: A One-Lady Rape About Comedy Starring her Pussy and Nothing Else

There. Are. No. Words.