TO Edinburgh’s Stand Comedy Club to see the scabrous and very funny Jay Lafferty, one of Scotland’s top stand-up artists. Lafferty is compering tonight’s show and works her audience expertly between each act, gently mocking their accents, jobs, clothes, countries of origin and relationship status.

She is also credited with the funniest joke – in a very crowded field – about Brexit. It was picked up by the New York Times in 2019 who used it on their front page as a means of trying to explain to their audience the madness of that time.

Lafferty is a regular panellist on the BBC’s Comedy Quiz Show, Breaking the News, and her sharp 38-second Brexit apercu was used to front up that week’s programme. I make no apologies for re-publishing it here in full – and introducing it to a much wider audience obvs – (insert winking emoji here).

“So the way I understand it is that Parliament have said no to Theresa’s deal. And they’ve said no to no deal, but some of them said yes to no deal but no to Theresa’s deal, but not as many that said no to no deal and no to Theresa’s deal, but they don’t actually have a deal of their own, which is a big deal because without a deal then no deal is more likely to be the deal that’s dealt, and the people who want the deal can’t be dealing with that.”

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I’m moved to confess though, that this is a somewhat elaborate way of trailing my full interview with Lafferty in next week’s paper. And besides, if I re-print her joke this week it will free up an extra hundred words or so for the interview.

I first met Lafferty during a recording of Breaking The News and at a time well before the BBC first began getting wide about some of my politics and my criticism of some of the mince we pay them for. I hadn’t been familiar with the programme and had mistakenly assumed it was another political panel discussion.

A producer had kindly sent notes on what to expect, advising that it might be a good idea to do some prep on content. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” thought I. My haughty carelessness was almost to be my undoing.

On reaching the venue in Edinburgh, I found that the other guests were all professional stand-up artists and sharper than the devil’s jodhpurs. Worse,when I peeked beyond the curtain I found a live audience of about 200 people. I was in way above my head and miles out of my comfort zone. Plus, I was a total fud for not prepping. And so it was now fight or flight.

Somehow I struggled through to the end without making too much of a horse’s fundament of myself … and with the kindness and generosity of Jay Lafferty and her professional pals and Des Clarke, the show’s splendid host.

I think I was invited back for Breaking The News a couple of times. And then it moved on to the television. And so the invites have dried up, probably on entirely reasonable aesthetic grounds.

Social media has many quotidien delights and some occasional edifications. Many of these occur when a big-ticket news event is unfolding, such as last week’s resignation of Liz Truss. Thus, we’ve all been entertained by the Daily Star’s Lettuce saga in which the tabloid predicted (rightly) that the stalwart salad accoutrement would last longer than Truss at 10 Downing Street.

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The tabs are far more artful at commandeering comestibles and animals for their fell purposes. About 20 years ago this paper’s predecessor ran an advertising campaign featuring rats running all over the mighty Herald crest. I also once mocked up the crest of the Scottish Rugby Union with maggots crawling about its escutcheon. Not perhaps what our poor readers were expecting when they took their paper with their ham and eggs on a Sunday morning.

The flipside of such jollity is when Scotland’s assorted poundland savants vie with each other to be all witty and eloquent about these occasions. At these times they don their imaginary togas and take to their fantasy forums to hand down their micro-sermons.

All of them affect to be emotionally scarred for the rest of their middle-class, well-recompensed lives about the Liz Truss micro-era.

They proclaiming and declaiming all over the shop with terrifying certainty of one who thinks he’s happened upon the key to all philosophical truths. It leaves me quite knackered.

AT The Stand on Friday night, Jay Lafferty was showing she’d lost none of the fleetness of thought that produced her Brexit joke. Addressing a young Canadian couple in the front row of her show who had disclosed they were back-packing around Scotland, she said: “Your holiday’s lasted longer than Liz Truss.”