There’s only one question that comedians ask each other from March until summer: are you doing Edinburgh? They are a class of people for whom the city isn’t a place, but is rather the month between July and September.

For the best part of a decade, I was the same. I did package shows there with friends — three acts and a compere for a fiver. Then I did five solo shows in 2002-06. It never occurred to me that you could do anything else with the summer. If you’re a comedian, and want to get away from endless pub gigs and club nights, you have to do the festival. It can be career-changing.

You could be scouted by TV, booked for radio or have a full-scale nervous collapse live on stage during the first week, and be spoken of in hushed tones for the rest of the month. But market forces have made Edinburgh almost unworkable for the next generation of comics.

It has become painfully, impossibly expensive. I first went to Edinburgh in 1994, as a student. My friend Kara and I blagged a lift with her dad, stayed in a youth hostel and saw 20 shows in four days. The whole trip — food, booze, shows, thank-you-for- the-lift-cheese — cost about £200.

Now comedy shows by people you’ve never heard of cost £12 or more for an hour. If the comedian has made a fleeting appearance on Mock the Week or some loathsome Channel 4 sketch show where the merest notion of two men having sex with each other is both as hilarious and risqué as it was in the mid-1970s, the price will be higher still.

Comedy fans can no longer afford to see more than one, or at most two, shows in an evening, and the days of racing from one sweatpit to another are gone. On the plus side this does mean that you can avoid queueing in the freezing rain, then sweating profusely in a sauna-like room for an hour, before repeating the whole process 30 minutes later. As Rich Hall once pointed out, visiting Edinburgh can feel a lot like having malaria. And that’s before you add in the gin.

Ticket prices are certainly too high, but the real problem is that the audiences are having a far cheaper night out than the comedians. A tiny 55-seater venue is where most stand-ups begin their Edinburgh careers. Even if they sell out every show, they will lose at least £5,000 and more likely £10,000. The cost of putting on a show is vast. Production companies (who negotiate venues, organise posters and flyers, sort out your flat and so on) charge about £2,000. PRs charge anything from hundreds to thousands of pounds. Venues require hefty guarantees to cover the box office, technicians and door staff. Even in my day the rent for a month in Edinburgh was almost exactly double what it cost me to live in Islington for the rest of the year.

I was lucky enough to have a sponsor for my solo shows there, or it would certainly have been cheaper to stay in London, invite 50 people round to mine every night, perform my show to them, give them each 20 quid and send them home. Of course, comedians don’t have to pay for all of that. They can find their own venues and flat-shares, do their own flyering and their own PR. Tie cymbals between their legs and they could do their own play-in music too.

But if you’ve worked for several months on a show, you want it to be seen. The average audience for a Fringe show is, I believe, five. Even when you include all those empty houses for the puppet version of Medea, those aren’t good stats. Besides, I once flyered the same man every day in Edinburgh for a month. He never came to the show, and one day I asked why he still took a flyer each time. He looked at me hard, and said that he was putting them up, one by one, on his bedroom wall, but they kept falling down. I didn’t ask what adhesive he was using. I’m happier not knowing.

All this expense would still be worthwhile if newer comedians could really get noticed, as they could in the 1990s. The winners of the Perrier Best Newcomer Award (for a first full-length Edinburgh show) that decade included Harry Hill, Tim Vine, Milton Jones and the Mighty Boosh. These acts were deserved cult hits from their first outings in Edinburgh, and whatever costs they ran up doing their early shows have, I’m sure, been paid off with TV and radio money earned since — and all because they took a gamble on the festival and it succeeded.

But it was much easier for new comics to attract attention then, because the biggest names didn’t do Edinburgh. Comedians used to serve their time at the festival, do three or four years, build an audience, move into telly, tour big venues and never look back. If you could sell out the Hammersmith Apollo you probably wouldn’t bother to go to Edinburgh for a month in a 350-seater venue.

But over the past few years a succession of huge venues have been added to the Fringe roster, and many big names go to Scotland: Alistair McGowan is doing a full run, Janeane Garofalo is there for a couple of weeks, Ricky Gervais will only be doing one night, but to 3,000 people.

Audiences, quite understandably, would rather stake their money (up to £30 for Gervais) on someone they know they like, instead of risking a tenner on some bloke they’ve never heard of. But Ricky Gervais used to be some bloke they’d never heard of. And if, when he did Rubbernecker at the Café Royal in 2001, Stephen Fry or Rowan Atkinson had been up the road doing a show in a venue into which the Café Royal would fit 20 times over, he might still be.

Comedy, in other words, is eating its young. The status quo is being maintained at the expense of the next generation. The Fringe needs to shrink a little and costs need to be cut. The door price for a one-hour show shouldn’t be higher than a cinema ticket (and that’s Edinburgh cinemas, not Leicester Square). Above all, the industry should broaden its focus and look for its stars all year round. And comedy fans on a budget should look to the Camden Fringe in North West London in August, where all ticket prices are £7.50, big name or not.

Natalie Haynes will be appearing at the Camden Fringe: www.camdenfringe.org

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