Social media - and Twitter in particular - can be a seriously mixed bag for comedy people. For every up, there's a down; for every swing, a roundabout. Not that there's anything wrong with roundabouts, really, but you get the idea.

Even the most social media-sceptical of comedians will often have a Twitter presence, even if they only use it for promotional purposes: you'll hear nothing for weeks, forget you follow them, then they'll pop up with some tour dates as if they've never been away. It's undeniably a useful tool for plugging stuff, and Twitter's limited-character concept has also proven a useful way of honing the joke-writing skills, forcing comics to cut out the chaff and get to the meat of a gag.

The recent doubling of the site's character limit has taken away that challenge, sadly: now you can warble on at length, which is not necessarily a good thing. But then for a high-profile person, doing anything on Twitter is likely to encourage both good and bad responses, however brilliant it may be. Social media has certainly changed. In the good old days - still less than a decade ago - the edgiest thing about these sites was people poking each other on Facebook, and the only rival factions were the pokers and the pokies. Did you know that pokies is also a term for poker machines, incidentally? You do now.

Twitter itself was initially viewed as a place where people just wrote about what lunch they were having (now they post pictures of their lunch on Instagram), while the major bone of contention for comedians was lesser talents nicking their gags and tweeting them as if they were their own. We won't name them, but a couple of celebs were particularly shameless about joke appropriation, perhaps clinging to the old music hall idea that a gag is fair game as soon as someone tells it once.

But Twitter has grown enormously over the last five years, and transformed into a sort of big angry city rather than the quaint little town it used to be. No matter how apolitical and uncontroversial a comic may try to be, they're likely to get all sorts of stick at some point, for the most innocuous of gags. For that reason, a lot of famous funny people treat Twitter like a bus: they jump on and off it fairly regularly.

Still, dealing with abusive types can also be useful practice for comics who do regular gigs, and a lot of acts give as good as they get. One high-profile stand-up we spoke seemed to actively enjoy taking on Twitter trolls, and treats them like hecklers: his role, he said, is to abuse those rude people as amusingly as possible, for the enjoyment of his other followers, as if he's onstage in a club. And when they all wade in too, all the better.

Twitter, then: it's like the biggest, most out-of-control gig ever. And, like any gig, sometimes it's just best to leave the stage.