These days, television doesn’t just eat material, it eats comedians. Think of Johnny Vegas, chained to a desk made of beer and obscenity like a pub Prometheus. Look at Jimmy Carr, forced to host every show on Channel Four until they can find one that suits him. (Here’s a clue — he’s a stand-up comedian.)

Stand-ups can fit brilliantly into TV. Harry Hill has taken to the medium like a floppy-collared duck to bespectacled water. From refurbishing the unrefurbishable You’ve Been Framed to combining the clip show with the sketch show in TV Burp, Hill is a television natural. He swims in it. He has taken the wise step of making his first sitcom not a traditional Here’s Harry laugh track nonsense, but a surreal take on soap operas.

Set in a fictional world where Emmerdale yokels drink with unloveable East-Enders, Hill’s next venture is unique because it inhabits television, rather than having TV imposed upon it. Other comics suit TV, too. Dylan Moran works well in Black Books because he co-writes it. The many geniuses in Father Ted fitted it like a glove because it was written around them.

And then there’s Ricky Gervais, who not only bases his characters on himself — and sensibly keeps his stand-up onstage where it works best — but lives inside television so deeply that his first series was a docusoap parody and his second, essentially, is about how famous Ricky Gervais is now. The whole modesty “he’s an extra” premise is purely an anvil to beat out Gervais’s unique fame-based comedy. It’s genius, and it works, because it lives inside television.

This is both the fact and the curse of modern TV comedy. It’s all about TV. The Office’s influence is enormous — in the US now, apart from their own version of The Office, there’s the very scary The Comeback, a fake reality docusoap in which Lisa Kudrow plays a sitcom star making, er, a comeback. Funny or not, it’s a marked difference to the tradcom of another ex-Friends star, Matt LeBlanc, whose Joey fails because it assumes the audience can be bothered to pretend that Joey isn’t Matt.

The Comeback, like Extras, like The Office, like most new comedy, also relies on the humour of crippling embarrassment. These days jokes aren’t enough — the humiliation ethic, first developed in hidden-camera shows, is much stronger than pure invention. (There are exceptions; BBC Three’s The Message, appearing next year, is both reinvention and reinforcement of TV parody, and is both surreal and slick.)

Reality infects and infests comedy. Laugh tracks and similar artifice are borderline blasphemy — the sound of people laughing spoils the reality of comedy, whatever that is — but faking reality is OK. The excellent The Smoking Room is made to look as doco as possible, because, like The Royle Family and the less dressed-up Dinnerladies, it’s a real-time sitcom. Plodding naturalism elbows out the surrealism of comedy not because it’s more real, but because it looks like a documentary. This new attitude is everywhere. At least ten comics in Edinburgh are using TV screens in their acts — probably following Dave Gorman, whose solipsistic Who is Dave Gorman? brilliantly made stand-up into documentary.

Celeb shows and reality shows blur into comedy. Why should a TV company invest in sitcom when they can get “laughs” out of celebs? And this is almost unparodiable. Almost — Armando Iannucci’s viciously spot-on parody of Big Brother, in which six Z-list celebs were put in a Portakabin for a day and not actually filmed — is hopefully a barometer of the future.

Otherwise, things are less clear. Andrew McGibbon, a comedian and performer, says: “The British sitcom formula has gone the way of powdered egg.” For performers, the same applies to the traditional stand-up show. Comedians will continue to be in demand on TV, if they can write, if they can perform characters based on themselves, but mostly if they can inhabit the world of television. Which, like pop and everything else, continues to eat itself with a vengeance.

With Seinfeld we had a sitcom about nothing starring a stand-up playing a stand-up who wrote a sitcom about nothing. Things have got a lot more convoluted since then. One day, TV will just be two TV cameras looking at each other, reflecting themselves on a permanent loop. Hopefully, one of those cameras will have a sense of humour.

• David Quantick writes for many of the above people. His new comedy series, The Blagger's Guide, starts on Radio 2 on August 20 at 1pm

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