Edinburgh Notebook

The brilliant Irish comedian Andrew Maxwell describes doing stand-up at the Edinburgh Fringe as ‘exams for clowns’, and even though I first appeared there in 1981 (when the Cambridge Footlights Revue featured Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery), I felt an overwhelming surge of nervousness as I began my short run this year with the peerless mimic Jan Ravens (who herself had directed that illustrious 1981 cast). By the middle of the week, I’d finally managed to reach the zone that stand-up requires, being both relaxed and focused. Watching my favourite stand-ups (Hal Cruttenden, Simon Evans, Justin Moorhouse and Maxwell himself) and some exciting new discoveries — such as the hilariously outrageous Lou Sanders — I marvel at their skill: timing, inventiveness, observation, playfulness, interaction with the audience and call-backs (pay-offs to jokes planted earlier in the routine).

With Maxwell and Matt Forde in particular, I shared the self-imposed mission of making sense/nonsense of the past year, featuring Trump, Brexit, May and Corbyn. Forde’s is the more uncompromising and detailed political routine (the only one I saw which included four minutes on that comedy gift, the Scottish government’s Sustainable Growth Commission). As politicians become comedians, it’s not surprising that comedians get political. It’s not enough to make Trump or Boris look stupid: they do that themselves. I wanted to go further, explain why both men seem to be channelling the Radio 4 panel show The Unbelievable Truth, where guests have to smuggle the odd fact into a routine made up of nonsense. The Washington Post has been tracking the false claims and misleading statements uttered by President Trump since he took office. By the beginning of this month, they’d reached 4,229. Trump’s own ‘fake news’ is currently generating inaccuracies at the rate of between 400 and 500 a month — 79 on one day alone, 5 July.