Shows may come and shows may go but every year at the Fringe one show is always guaranteed to be on, staged in perpetuity; it’s Edinburgh’s equivalent of The Mousetrap, running now for the best part of six decades.

It isn’t necessarily a drama, this show, though it does bear similarities to Albee’s theatrical punch-up Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It isn’t strictly humorous either, even if it features many who made their names in that field. You could, one concedes, call this show just a black comedy. Either way, year in and year out the show causes heads to be scratched as reliably as a production of Peter Pan set in a Siberian labour camp.

It’s the annual Fringe fall-out, of course, the yearly huff or strop that invariably seems to materialise in Edinburgh every August. And, oddly, the strop always seems to locate itself in the realm of the chuckle. For a breed dedicated to the art of levity, the clown contingent at the Edinburgh Fringe seldom fail to demonstrate the truth of claims that comedy isn’t always a laughing matter.

Think back to 2005, for instance, when Bill Bailey and Alan Davies earned dubious glances from colleagues for having the temerity to appear in a straight drama production, The Odd Couple. The big stink of last year was Ricky Gervais’s “comedy rally” at Edinburgh Castle, seen as merely the newest evidence that the Fringe’s ramshackle demeanour was being erased by slick mainstream fodder.

This year the floating cloud of disgruntlement has settled over the very idea of the fledgling Edinburgh Comedy Festival. Many might have assumed that such a thing existed already, comedy and the Fringe being as synonymous in the public mind as Oktoberfest and beer. The bigger and more prestigious comedy venues, however, have decided this year to amalgamate their programmes and present them under the umbrella of the newly-minted Comedy Festival. Effectively this will create a festival within a festival, or rather a separate festival to add to the International, book, jazz and blues and military festivals that operate in August already.

The idea is the concoction of four of the Fringe’s biggest-hitters: the Gilded Balloon, the Underbelly, the Pleasance and the Assembly Rooms. Collectively the four already present about 40% of the Fringe’s comedy programme. Considered positively, say the four, the new festival will consolidate the identity of comedy on the Fringe and allow financial savings through the pooling of venue resources.

The corollary here is that comedy is a surprisingly expensive commodity to produce. To most of us such a claim seems counterintuitive given that comedy seldom involves much more than a person with a microphone on a bare stage: “It’s one of the great falsifications about this business,” says William Burdett-Coutts, director of the Assembly Rooms. “Just because performers are clamouring to come to Edinburgh doesn’t mean that audiences are too,” he says. “If you leave Scotland you read or hear very little about the Fringe, it gets increasingly less coverage in the national press, it’s barely covered by television.”

“I quite welcome this new Comedy Festival,” says one Fringe insider, “because it’ll pen all those £30-a-ticket big names together and allow them to be easily avoided. If I know where they are I know where not to go. An official Comedy Festival run by the Assembly Rooms and the Pleasance will be full of acts rehearsing shows for their autumn tours. If I go to the Fringe it’s to see someone new and exciting. It’s not so I can be in the audience as Bill Bailey records his Christmas DVD. I picture an official Comedy Festival and I see Jimmy Carr’s boot stamping on a human face forever.”

Tommy Shepherd, a comedy promoter who runs the Stand, declined to become involved with the festival when it announced its formation in March. Steve Cardownie, the deputy leader of Edinburgh city council, has been reported, incorrectly he claims, as being prepared to rescind the leases that two of the big four have on their council-owned venues should the “breakaway” festival impact adversely on the rest of the Fringe.

One concern is that the new festival might eventually detach itself from the bulk of the August proceedings, as the film festival did in June. He is planning to host a public meeting midway through the Fringe to canvas promoters, performers and critics on whether the new festival is exerting any adverse effect: “My big concern is that some theatre group in Moscow reads about the Fringe, gathers the idea that it’s just all comedy and decides not to come,” he says, “So the council will be keeping a close watch on ticket sales and on whether sponsors take their business from small companies to go to the Comedy Festival. At the same time, we have to be careful that shows don’t use the Comedy Festival to cover up their own failings. If shows do badly it’ll be easy to say, oh, the Comedy Festival has taken all our business. The Comedy Festival can’t be allowed to become the scapegoat some would like to make it.”

That tendency, though, was hardly dampened when the Comedy Festival, to the Fringe fraternity’s chagrin, chose to unveil its programme a day before the official Fringe programme was launched.

Another concern involves terminology: if a comedian is performing at a venue not run by the big four are they, effectively, disbarred from being part of a Comedy Festival? Are they officially no longer funny?

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