For seven years running, I have not performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. These days, I find it much more entertaining instead to stay at home and spend the month of August acting out in funny voices the Fringe catalogue descriptions of the innumerable shows that dare to call themselves comedy. Is It ADHD?, Fat, Femme, and Crippled, and AI Jesus, to name but a few of this year’s offerings.

At the risk of revealing an old-fashioned understanding of comedy as something that should be funny enough to make a person laugh, I’ve always felt the descriptions to shows such as these reek of a desperate attempt to mask a glaring lack of comedic talent. Humour becomes subjected to the fashionable yoke of armchair psychology, the well-intentioned but gooey niceness of a diversity seminar, or even nowadays the programmable coldness of a technologically artificial weltanschauung. Indeed, the counterfeit comedy scene of today even has its own special cadre of careerists attempting to pawn off pseudo-political chatter as comedic entertainment.

Because by far, the easiest fake-comedy item for me to make fun of this year was the story of Comedy Unleashed having its one-off show cancelled because its mystery guest was none other than Father Ted co-creator turned trans-obsessive, Graham Linehan, the self-proclaimed saviour of biological women via way of their toilets.

Like an undersexed group of Oxford students during rag week, the publicity-grabbing mischief makers of Comedy Unleashed, co-founders Andy Shaw and Andrew Doyle, intentionally concealed the identity of their headliner Linehan. When the proprietors of the Leith Arches, a venue known for its positive stance towards the LGBT community as well as for playing host to numerous drag events, discovered the truth and acted in accordance with their own beliefs, the faux outrage from the Comedy Unleashed machine went forth once more like an orchestrated squawk: ‘We’ve been cancelled again!"’

For it seemed to me from the very start, knowing a thing or two as I do about the modus operandi of Comedy Unleashed, as if the club had intentionally booked themselves into the most LGBT-friendly venue in one of the most LGBT-friendly cities during one of the most LGBT-friendly arts festivals in the hopes that the plug would be pulled on them the moment Graham Linehan was revealed as their celebrity mystery guest. Right on cue, they got their wish.

Instantly, a dreary comedy lineup comprised of the same type of desperately untalented hacks as the rest of the Fringe, albeit peddling a different set of Newspeak catchwords such as ‘triggered’ and ‘snowflake’ and ‘woke’, had been cast into the wilderness. How convenient it was last Thursday for this diasporic lot, therefore, that they found themselves with no other place to go than just outside the Scottish Houses of Parliament in Holyrood, recent enactors of the Gender Recognition Bill.

And after all this ideological persecution, this wandering in the desert, this nomadic quest for a comedic Israel, what eventually ensued when Graham Linehan, former comedy writer, finally took the stage?

Well, the whole affair lasted a little over five minutes, about 50 minutes shorter than your average Edinburgh Festival debut. Nevertheless, Linehan still managed to pack in quite a lot. He began by observing that ‘the last two days have been insane’. Here, I would fault him for unoriginality, given that this material has been used around water coolers, at family dining tables, and in school playgrounds ever since the dawn of small talk.

Linehan then segued into his own well-known drag character, Cassandra, by reiterating prophecies of transvestic Armageddon and bemoaning his own unheeded lot in life. ‘What did I do?’ he rhetorically queried at one point, soliciting a smattering of applause from a crowd of people who may have been thinking at this juncture: ‘Gee, I’ve always wanted to do comedy, but never thought it was possible until now!’

To be fair, Linehan did manage to at least say the word ‘comedy’ only to gripe that he hadn’t been allowed to do it for five years. This seeming contradiction elicited from one of the punters a hearty ‘We’ve got your back, Graham!’ delivered in the Blitz spirit of someone who just missed Dunkirk by 83 years.

And in a blink of an eye, the show was over. The microscopic brevity of the event juxtaposed with its overinflated importance was more akin to a visiting head of state posing for a photo-op.

Now, I would not call this a comedy show in the strictest sense of the word. Or the loosest, for that matter. To be sure, if your idea of comedy is someone like Konstantin Kisin rolling his frog-like eyes as he croaks out the term ‘cultural Marxism’, or Comedy Unleashed co-founder and GB News presenter Andrew Doyle smirking at a camera as he frets and squeals about ‘woke activists’, or a once-brilliant television comedy writer forsaking his former talents to work full-time for Elon Musk, this might be right up your alley.

Maybe I’m too demanding, but Linehan’s comedy performance last Thursday under the banner of Comedy Unleashed seemed a far cry from Richard Pryor, Peter Cook, or even Linehan’s own back catalogue.

There is nothing new with naked careerism in comedy, most especially at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Whether this takes the form of sappy identity politics, shamelessly exploited trauma, or, in the case of Comedy Unleashed, orchestrated acts of mischief followed by endless mind-numbing discussions on what isn’t allowed in comedy anymore, the motivation is twofold: to simultaneously mask a dearth of creativity and to generate publicity.

Whether or not a show is truly funny is beside the point. Some careerist comedians may scramble to attach a dubious mental health diagnosis to their publicity materials whilst others still opt for the more tried and tested formulas of race, gender, or sexual orientation. And as pretenders to the comedic profession become even more ubiquitous, even politicians – once a sworn enemy group of all true comedians – are starting to make their flaccid presence felt at the Fringe. Anyone who really want to put a nail into the coffin of comedy, for instance, should head over to the Pleasance Theatre this August for Iain Dale: All Talk with Nicola Sturgeon.

What makes Comedy Unleashed an especially troubling case of careerism, however, is that they have puffed themselves up for the past five years as the antidote to all other comedy currently on the circuit. Taking advantage of a computerised age that binarily cleaves the public consciousness between insincere digital kindness and indiscriminate digital hate, the opportunists at Comedy Unleashed have managed to forge their own selling point simply by deriding the selling points of their contemporaries as ‘woke’ and deluding their own punters into thinking there is a ‘war of woke’.

Like all bad comedians in search of an audience, they would like to be regarded as something different, but they are decidedly not. This is why the sharpest needles one can employ to puncture their puerile pretensions are not the differences between the two fields of what they themselves brand "woke" and "anti-woke" comedy, but their similarities.

The first and most obvious similarity, of course, is that neither Comedy Unleashed nor their professed comedic enemies exhibit anything representative of authentic talent. Is it at all possible, for example, that a true comedy connoisseur would ever be doubled-over with belly-ripping laughter at hearing Konstantin Kisin squeak, ‘I don’t think you have a right not to be offended’? Or Andrew Doyle bragging to his media buddy Piers Morgan about how he created a fake Twitter profile? Or Graham Linehan bitching from a comedy stage about no longer being allowed to do comedy?

Genuine devotees of the comedic art form, those who can tell the difference between chatter and craftsmanship, sarcasm and satire, would regard such inane drivel with the same critical contempt they might grant to shows with titles like Is It ADHD? or Fat, Femme, And Crippled. The differences are only illusory. Bad comedy is bad comedy no matter what is being sold, even if the selling point is a repackaged version of freedom.

Secondly, despite lacking this essential ingredient of talent, Comedy Unleashed, like their contemporaries, are not willing to let that deter them from doing everything possible to get recognition. Recognition for what, exactly? Well, for a devoted careerist, at least in the abstract, the type of recognition never really matters.

In 2016, Mark Meechan, a Scottish blogger with too little to say and too much time to say it in, trained his unfortunate dog to deliver a Hitler salute and, in so doing, became one of the early doyens of the Comedy Unleashed agenda. Graham Linehan, once known for some of the most side-splitting comedy ever to hit the airwaves, has forsaken his earlier prowess to establish himself as Twitter’s - now X’s - resident pseudo-feminist and transvestite-baiter.

Konstantin Kisin, as bland as unseasoned tofu was rocketed into the chattering stratosphere after his carefully timed refusal to sign a safe space agreement in 2018 gained him, along with sundry publishing deals, not just a coveted appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News programme but even a speaking engagement at the once-reputable Oxford Union.

Of course, all these career trajectories were anything but organic or grassroots in their nature. If you’ve ever wondered how a comedian with considerably less comedic talent than most people you went to school with can wind up on Live At The Apollo or, conversely, why your once apolitical uncle is now speaking about a ‘war on biological women’ instead of what’s for Sunday lunch, it is crucially important to understand the machinery involved.

This leads to the final similarity between Comedy Unleashed and their Edinburgh Festival Fringe counterparts, which is the public relations apparatus. When one sees a dreadful mainstream show at the Fringe (yes, the £1billion-a-year- generating Fringe Festival does encompasses such linguistic contradictions as ‘mainstream Fringe’) one is not just seeing the work of a talentless comedian, but also the work of a unethical and unscrupulous public relations team, vested with the sole purpose of deluding a lazy press and a gullible public that the show in question is worth seeing.

For five years, Comedy Unleashed has shown itself quite adept at making the most out of this corrupt and philistine framework. The organisers, Andy Shaw and Andrew Doyle, know quite well that a Konstantin Kisin relying on his own comedic merits, a Mark Meechan inflicting antisemitic animal abuse on a helpless dog, or an even once-talented comedy writer like Graham Linehan squandering his creative abilities on Twitter would be more prone to generate nauseous revulsion from a truly freethinking public instead of any legitimate intellectual interest.

To counteract this undesired natural outcome, Shaw and Doyle are always at the ready with their own public relations machine, replete with a network of entrenched British media connections at The Spectator, The Telegraph, spikedonline, the Institute of Ideas, Piers Morgan, and the Sky News production staff, to name but a few of their nepotistic stalwarts. On certain occasions, such as the present manufactured fiasco surrounding Graham Linehan, they can even rely on publicity from connections based within their sworn institutional enemy, the BBC.

It bears noting in this regard that more than a few Comedy Unleashed figureheads once enjoyed quite comfortable careers at the BBC before diversifying into their present business of complaining about the ostensibly left-wing inclinations of their former employer.  Andrew Doyle as a regular panel guest on The Moral Maze and Konstantin Kisin as a paid staff writer for The Mash Report paint quite a different picture from the persecuted underdogs of the contemporary comedy scene they wish to identify as now.

One decisive advantage the Comedy Unleashed public relations team has over its traditional showbusiness equivalent is that theirs is entirely an in-house operation. Most typical starry-eyed novices to the Fringe will have to pay extraordinary amounts of money to hire their own public relations agent, who in turn is expected to scout out publications willing to review and publicise their client’s show.

Comedy Unleashed, on the other hand, acting like the used car salesmen of bygone late-night US television commercials, promises to ‘cut out the middleman’. Not only will Shaw, Doyle, and company go out of their way to rebrand their stable of fifth-rate comedians as freethinking intellectual dissidents perpetually running into problems with the so-called ‘woke police’, but they will even, from time to time, go one step further by furnishing the very problems themselves.

Secretly booking the UK’s most preeminent anti-drag obsessive to perform at one of Edinburgh’s most LGBT-friendly clubs could easily be construed as just the sort of ham-fisted attempt at pseudo-political publicity for which the club is best known. Whether elevating a YouTube dog abuser to the status of Voltaire, conflating Andrew Doyle’s Titania McGrath account with Jonathan Swift, or plopping down an embittered ex-writer in front of the Scottish Parliament to mumble through a few minutes  of self-pity, Comedy Unleashed, just like the leftist counterparts they deride, thrives on manufactured outrage.

I should mention that all the above is not necessarily to decry wholesale the practice of staged pranks. Personally, pranks are not my style, although I must admit there have been some amusing and compelling exceptions throughout history. The late impresario Malcolm McLaren, for instance, engaged in his own style of situationist marketing at the dawn of punk, but at least that brought about some truly memorable music and fashion.

Conversely, all that Comedy Unleashed and Graham Linehan have to offer the current zeitgeist is a backwards-aiming, internet-meme mentality, which attempts to dupe an incredulous British public into believing that David Bowie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the New Romantics never happened.

Obviously, I can only speculate as to why someone like Graham Linehan would forsake his comedic talents to throw his lot in with the professional mischief-makers of Comedy Unleashed. Perhaps he realised, after some cynical calculation, that chattering about political issues and tweeting until the wee hours of the morning requires considerably less creative effort than crafting another laugh-a-minute, gut-busting sitcom. Maybe he’s simply run out of creative ideas.

There is also, I suppose, the Slim possibility that Linehan does really believe he is the leader of this curious new wave of feminism which requires a big strong man to drive a wedge between women and transgenders.

What I can say for certain is that every now and then Comedy Unleashed manages to get their hands on somebody who does have an actual track record of producing hilarious comedy. I say this because they once managed to get their hands on me until I eventually turned my satirical sights on them, forcing the faux free speech founders to make me disappear down the memory hole.

Now, for the time being, they’ve got their hands on Graham Linehan, but not the Graham Linehan that once blew the minds of comedy fans across the UK by raising sitcom scriptwriting to the level of high art. Brilliance such as Father Ted and the IT Crowd is not the sort of product Comedy Unleashed knows how to or even cares to sell.

Instead, they’ve got Graham Linehan exactly where they need him; obsessed with a fictitious culture war, frittering his life away on social media, and depressingly uncreative. An easily marketable concoction for organisations as disinterested in comedy as Comedy Unleashed and their Edinburgh Festival Fringe counterparts.

One cannot help but shudder to think of the future creative ramifications for the state of comedy here. Imagine a budding young comedic talent, perhaps nourished from his or her youth on a steady diet of Steve Martin albums, Monty Python films, and Father Ted episodes.

Imbued with an original creative voice and imaginative comedic vision, he or she surveys the contemporary comedic landscape with hope and wonder. They may rightly consider their race, gender, or sexual orientation beneath their aspirational comedic aims and they aren’t about to incorporate some sellable mental health diagnosis to push their unique brand of talent. Abject disillusion finally sets in, however, when they turn to the other side and see only panel discussions on ‘wokeness killing comedy’, tabloid columns on ‘offence culture’, and individuals taking advantage of all the delectable trappings of a comedy club - the lights, the stage, the microphone, the audience – not to perform comedy, but to talk headlines. The end result, of course, is that comedy is smothered in the cradle.

Therefore, when Comedy Unleashed dares to lament in the numerous press appearances which will invariably follow in the wake of this latest publicity campaign that ‘comedy is being lost’, they might do well first to ask themselves what role they play in that process.