The driver didn’t even know he’d done it. Only when he felt something dragging beneath his Rolls-Royce did he pull up. By that time he had knocked Tom Snyders off his bike and pushed him 30ft along the road. Realising too late, the 75-year-old driver panicked and went into reverse. The front wheel rolled across Snyder’s chest.

The accident on a Los Angeles highway left Snyders with several broken bones and a metal plate with eight screws in his left ankle. He was three days in a coma, eight months in a wheelchair and subjected to intensive physiotherapy. When his recuperation was complete, he did the only thing he knew. He got back in the saddle.

“Everybody thought I was nuts,” says Snyders. “I didn’t want to be afraid to ride a bike for the rest of my life. I’d been on the road for several years and I thought, ‘I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this guy determine when I end this trip.’ ”

There was more at stake than lost pride, however. Snyders is America’s self-styled bicycling comedian. He makes his living from pedal power, criss-crossing that vast continent on two wheels, cycling between gigs, clocking up an estimated 130,000 miles while his contemporaries burn up fossil fuels in trains, planes and automobiles. It had become too much a way of life to let a mere accident bring it to an end.

“I would do Tuesday through Saturday night in Des Moines, Iowa, then get on the bike on Sunday and ride 100 miles a day for three days and then do a week’s worth of shows in Omaha, Nebraska,” he says.

“America has such a car culture that it is pretty dangerous in a lot of places. Because I’m doing the comedy clubs, I ride into New York city and Los Angeles on a bike, which is crazy, although once you get into New York city, the bike is the best way to get around.”

Packed into Snyders’s pannier are slides he has taken of amusing signs he has come across on his travels. There’s the shop advertising “Dead Cows on Sale Here”, the roadside thermometer claiming a temperature of 199F and the handwritten direction to a small town in the mountains of Pennsylvania that reads: “Die Seven Miles.”

He first used a couple on stage to pad out an hour-long set when he had only 20 minutes of material. They went down better than his jokes, so realising he was on to a good thing he let them grow into the central part of his act. Last year, 200 of his pictures were included in National Lampoon’s Big Book of True Facts, which has been flying off the shelves.

“I’ve been 18 years on a bicycle and I can pretty much guarantee to see funny stuff along the way,” says Snyders, who is writing a book about his experiences as well as a screenplay about a comedian who rides round America on a bike. “My material just writes itself. It’s not that I’m a comedic genius — the stuff’s out there for the taking. I see a lot of stuff that people driving by in cars would miss because I’m not going at 60mph.

“But there is always a danger if you’ve been riding in the sun across the desert for many hours. You look at something and think it’s hysterical, then you try it in the show and nobody’s laughing.”

Remarkably, his two-wheeled career began quite by chance. As a young comedian, Snyders was moving to Las Vegas when his battered $500 car exploded and died on him. Penniless, sleeping on a friend’s floor and eating casino food, he had no means of getting to his next gig in Des Moines, 1,500 miles away.

“The Tropicana casino had a deal where you could show them an out-of-state driver’s licence and they’d give you $10 of chips to gamble with,” he says. “I’d play blackjack, cash in and go to the buffet. I decided that if I could get $200 together, I’d buy some supplies and ride out on my old, beat-up bike. Three days later I was riding across the desert, thinking maybe I should have done some training.”

His journey to Scotland to make his Edinburgh fringe debut has been typically strenuous. Leaving Key West in Florida in June, he cycled through Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Sweden before the final London-Edinburgh leg.

“It’s funny when you get a bunch of comedians in a club and they’re all telling their horror travel stories about being stuck in airports for three hours,” he laughs. “Soon as I walk in the room, they just have to shut up.”

The Bicycling Comedian’s One Man Show, Gilded Balloon Teviot, Edinburgh, until Aug 28. No performance today

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