I was in an audience of two for a Michael McIntyre show in 2003 – Edinburgh Festival fairy tales can still happen

When every performance has the potential to change your fortunes for good or ill, is it any wonder that comics go a little bit bonkers up in Edinburgh?

It’s almost here! A gigantic, chaotic blur of comedians, poets, dancers, actors, hula-hoopers and juggling donkeys (probably) is about to descend on the magical city of Edinburgh for The Festival. Over four packed weeks, zillions of seats will compete for a mere squillion bums belonging to bewildered tourists from all over the globe, their little English phrasebooks poking uselessly out of their rucksacks as a Cornish-language youth group with a particularly merciless flyering operation launches into its four-hour rap musical about the Beast of Bodmin.

For newer comedians who perform night after night in the hope of having a break-out hit – or at least not entering the winter in abject penury – the month can feel like something akin to a hand-cranked rollercoaster, while those who’ve already made their names compete to draw in the industry faces who might be able to give them the work that’ll see them through the rest of the year.

When every performance has the potential to change your fortunes for good or ill, is it any wonder that comics go a little bit bonkers up in Edinburgh? It might seem from the outside that we’re having a great time drinking in bars until 5am with our friends, but the work starts backing up long before your hangover fades and your eyeballs return to their usual size. One minute you’ll be having a coffee and tending one another’s review scars, and the next you’re making a panicky dash across town to record an obscure podcast on the off-chance that one of its 53 listeners might be sufficiently charmed by your frayed ramblings to come to your show.

In 2003, I shared a venue with a 27-year-old Michael McIntyre. His show followed immediately after mine, so I’d often wait for him to finish and we’d hang out. One night, not a single punter turned up to his show, so he performed the whole thing to an audience consisting of me and the young student who was doing his tech, both of whom had already seen it perhaps a dozen times. Before you break into sobs, by the end of the month, he’d been nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer award, and the rest you know.

At that time, stand-up still felt like a fairly subversive occupation. Admittedly it was a far cry from the Eighties, when successful comics like Alexei Sayle and Rik Mayall lent the scene an anarchic outsider edge along with countless less celebrated others, but it still retained a sense of feral unpredictability. These days it can sometimes feel like what happens when a few hundred unwieldy egos with crushingly low self-esteem get fed into a careers advice algorithm. That’s not to deny that there are some extremely funny people on the scene, but they all seem to spend an indecent proportion of their lives knowing exactly where they last saw their shoes. New comics just seem a little less chaotic than we were.

When I started doing stand-up back in the Nineties, most comedy clubs were sticky-soled rooms in the backs of pubs, and everybody smoked on stage. I have vivid memories of “dying” in one such room, in Hammersmith in 1996. Of course, it happened many times after that, but your first death is special. But then, dying is part of being a stand-up. It is not to be confused with having a bad gig. Seasoned comics pop into these clubs for the perverse enjoyment of having to struggle and not quite knowing whether we’ll get through it.

It’s hard to describe the experience of dying. You feel like you’ve been hollowed out only to be filled back up with a frozen shame that will thaw and trickle out with unbearable slowness. But it’s also where you discover whether you belong – whether you are, in fact, a comic – because as desperately as you may wish for the earth to pull you into a cold, damp pit where nobody will ever see you again, it is nothing next to your desperation to get back up on that stage. Comics can’t not do what we do. It’s a compulsion – a disease. If a week goes by when I haven’t done a gig, I get really friendly at bus stops.

This year, I’m taking my show up to Edinburgh just for the first week. I’ve already toured it but, given that it’s a show loosely themed around my twenty years on the circuit, I can’t resist taking it to its spiritual home.

If you’re going to the festival yourself, don’t just rely on critics and journalists to tell you what to see; get on Twitter and ask comedians to give you a few names who aren’t yet getting the press to match their talent. My show is in the afternoon, so I can spend the rest of the day watching back-to-back comedy and losing track of my shoes. I’ll keep you posted.