Forget about the comics, what about the jokes? Each year at the Fringe - or the Edinburgh Comedy Festival on the Fringe as it's now called by the powers that be (subvert! Call it ECFoF!) - you can take the temperature of the comic world by the gags that are told. And this year it seems the matter of most pressing concern to our comedians is access to wi-fi.
Amidst an admirably prodigious output of reviews from the Independent's Julian Hall this morning, a theme emerges. Andrew Lawrence gets four stars for a show where "cynicism and bile… are the order of the day", and it seems he turns some of it onto people "who think that having no wi-fi is tantamount to Victoriana". A three-star review for Mark Olver's hour about the delights of rambling (both sense of the word are applicable) reveals that Olver feels guilty for wasting his life, a crucial observation being: "I spend an hour-and-a-half each day looking for a wireless signal in my flat".
Fortunately for us all, the provision of broadband is not the only subject engaging comedians at this year's fest. Shona Craven claims in the Herald that "shows making reference to the credit crunch, property programmes [shurely so 2005?] and Shannon Matthews can be found all over the Fringe". She then goes on to review three thematically similar shows about the travails of new dads. Alun Cochrane, admittedly a consistently rounded performer, comes out best with four stars for his unsentimental take on parenthood, mixed with a spiel against modern selfishness. Dan March, by contrast, and his tale of discovering he had become a dad via MySpace, gets just two stars.
There's another review that falls one point short of the ultimate condemnation this morning and, surprisingly, it's for Stewart Lee. His follow-up to last year's dramatisation of the travels of Boswell and Dr Johnson offers a comic take on the tangled relations between Elizabeth I and Sir Walter Raleigh. There's galleons for hats, and Simon Munnery in drag, but still, writes Dominic Maxwell in the Times, "The result … is an undernourished hour that might muscle its way into your affections in a smaller, scuzzier room, but which looks stiff as an iron ruff in the Cow Barn".