By Paul Majendie

EDINBURGH (Reuters Life!) - "Bouncy Castle Macbeth." "Jihad The Musical." "Robin Hood and the Witness Protection Programme."

Or how about "I Kissed a Frog and it gave me Herpes?" Or "Is Dick Cheney Evil?"

The title is everything if you want to grab attention at the world's largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where almost 19,000 performers are staging a record 2,050 shows over three weeks of artistic insanity in August.

Even reading the 288-page Fringe programme is a stamina test in itself as audiences try to separate the wheat from the chaff at the festival running from Aug. 5 to Aug. 27.

Fringe Director Jon Morgan is in awe of the ingenuity used by people to make their show stand out from the rest in the programme where shows are listed in alphabetical order.

"They will put twenty AAAs at the beginning of a show title to make sure it is first in the Fringe programme or they will put the word orgasm in the title. I do find it amusing the attempts to make the titles eye-grabbing," he said.

The Edinburgh Fringe has been running for over 60 years, launched when eight theatre groups turn up uninvited to the first Edinburgh International Festival and checked in at venues away from the big public stages.

But as the number of participants has increased over the years so has the battle to win audiences with theater groups coming up with more imaginative ways to grab attention.

This year audiences can take their pick between "Debbie Does Dallas: The Musical" and "A Few Little Drops -- the extraordinary life of water."

But, wading through an eclectic mix of surreal titles, some may have trouble deciding what to make of "The voices in my head have formed a choir and somebody's singing flat."

"I must say the three-line summaries people give in the programme of their shows are works of art in themselves. It is quite challenging to summarise them," Morgan said.

Picking the weirdest title of the year can be a challenge. Classics in the past have included "Afternoon Tea with a Transvestite," "Sit: The History of the Chair," and "How To Explain The History of Communism To Mental Patients."

Andrew Eaton, arts editor of The Scotsman newspaper, is a great fan of quirky Fringe venues that have ranged from a public toilet to a lift to the top of a doubledecker bus and to the back seat of a car.

"The shows in peculiar venues do put a smile on my face. There is more and more of that. But there is nothing new under the sun. It must be very hard to find a novelty that no one has tried before," he said.

And he, like Morgan, is full of admiration for the succinct titles and punchy show summaries designed to entice crowds in.

"It is really high concept stuff. I make the comparison with Hollywood where you have to sum up a film in one line."