It’s the halfway point at the Edinburgh Fringe and I’ve got a day off. So obviously, as a stand-up comic faced with having to listen to the thoughts inside my own head, I decided to forgo that particular torture and write something about the Fringe instead…

After extensive research (looking at the posters I pass on the way to my show), the big topics of the year seem to revolve around death, mental health issues, relationship break-ups, gender and sexuality. There are also quite a few shows that seem to be about nothing at all and I think this is a very good thing. As long as it’s funny, just messing about for an hour is to be encouraged. But overtly political shows seem to be about as rare as a filter on a sewage outflow.

Where’s the comedy at the Fringe that holds the powerful to account? Like the sort of stuff that, to give a random example, happens at 4pm every day at the Counting House from now until the 27th.

In Edinburgh, anyone is supposed to be able to say what they like. Privately, everyone I speak to is appalled by the current state of our country and we all agree that the world is a bin fire. But if there was a theme league table, politics would, I think, be hovering around the relegation zone. Why?

Firstly, I think Brexit and then the Covid response cast a very long shadow over our lives and maybe we just need some escapism. It is a festival after all and we can’t be angry all the time and if there are some South Korean acrobats on in the circus tent or a show where someone plays the bagpipes while juggling (there might be one, I haven’t actually checked), well, it’s nice to have an hour when we’re not thinking about the cost of living crisis or small boats trying to cross the channel or the fact that America might re-elect Donald Trump. They say that in the film business, the worse things get politically, the more escapist the movies become. Maybe it’s the same for comedy.

Right now, most younger comedians think it’s a lot easier and safer to look inwards rather than outwards. The pervasive atmosphere on social media of ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ discourages comedians from broaching difficult subjects. The BBC should be filling the hole but they haven’t replaced Mock The Week and The Mash Report because they appear terrified of the Daily Mail.  As for ITV trying political satire, it’s like giving a dog a remote control. Who knows what you’d get?

But whatever political opinion you express, someone will almost certainly get the hump and the view seems to be that we don’t need the stress when we can easily spend an hour talking about our substance abuse/marriage break up/sexual awakening/insert other personal trauma here.

And yet, there is an appetite for it. My show is a political show and audiences are lapping it up. Matt Forde is packing them out at The Pleasance. So is Rosie Holt. Geoff Norcott has sold out his entire run. These are not shows that hark back to the polemical days of the early 1980s. We all think there’s enough division and rancour as it is.

But surely we can find the humour in Suella Braverman, a Home Secretary who’s making us pine for the halcyon liberal days of Priti Patel. Or water companies saying they have a liquidity problem (that one writes itself) while paying shareholders vast dividends and at the same time discharging thousands of gallons of actual human shit into our rivers and streams. Or a pliant Tory press blaming junior doctors, people who work ninety hours a week, for the decline in the NHS. And all while a flip-flopping leader of the opposition won’t commit to anything that will upset anybody except the left of his own party.

If not now for political comedy, when?

• Ian Stone Will Make it Better is in the Ballroom at The Counting House at 4pm every day until August 27.