After decades in the business, are the laughs beginning to fade?

Do comedians actually like comedy, after doing it for years? You often hear it about footballers who've retired relatively early, that they've fallen out of love with the game. Then they end up as a TV pundit, even though they stopped watching football years ago, which explains why a lot of ex-players seem to know less about the sport than we do. So does it happen with comics too?

Right now, for example, many of the nation's comedians will have just about recharged their batteries after rolling the dice with another punt at the Edinburgh Fringe. After doing 25 shows on the spin - and often loads of guest spots - you can bet that your average comic probably doesn't want to even think about jokes for weeks, at all. They'll be getting lost in a good book, or browsing the best bingo sites UK gaming has to offer, or catching up on the films and TV they missed during August - but maybe not any comedies.

Different comedians approach festivals very differently. Some make the most of it and try to see as many other shows as possible (perhaps not stuff anything like the style of their own show, though), while many will avoid seeing anything else at all, unless strictly necessary. It probably depends on how much confidence you have in your own show: nobody wants to see someone else bring the house down while you're struggling to keep a roof over your head.

It's a bit of an industry cliché that a lot of famous comics turned out to be pretty grumpy away from the spotlight; but were they always like that? Did they turn to comedy as a way to express themselves more openly, via that more outgoing persona you can adopt onstage? Or did they gradually turn miserable, after years where the degree at which you could make other people laugh determined how successful your life was deemed to be?

It's a wildly inexact science, comedy: even the great masters will often readily admit that they don't really know which bit will work and which will stink the place out, before trying it, then tweaking it, then perhaps ditching it altogether. Basing your whole career on such a random game of chance is enough to make anyone turn a bit anti-comedy offstage, after decades of trial and error. You certainly wouldn't respond well to that frequent request from punters: 'tell us a joke then.'

No wonder a number of Britain's finest stand-ups have moved into other categories of show-making, after years at the top of the comedy tree, even if that shift is quite subtle. Sometimes there's a tipping point, where your usual mix of stand-up and serious stuff shifts the other way enough that you stop calling it comedy altogether, even if your audience don't actually notice how it's listed.

That way you can probably start enjoying comedy again, on stage or screen, because you aren't competing with them anymore. You'll just have to ignore all other theatre, instead.