'Why did the lefty cross the road?' How liberal Edinburgh comics are panning PC

Identity politics has gone too far. PC has gone mad. These aren’t unfashionable opinions: they’re practically mainstream. What’s new in fringe comedy is that we’re now hearing it from leftwing comics. That’s both a fascinating phenomenon, and a troublesome one. Fascinating because there may be some truth in these propositions, and the left needs to interrogate them. Troublesome because standup doesn’t always favour nuance and fine margins, and one or two of these leftwing comedians – whether they’re mocking champagne socialists, rehabilitating slavery or defending the Iraq war – can start to sound (accidentally or on purpose) pretty rightwing.

Fin Taylor is pre-eminent among them – a rising star whose 2016 show Whitey McWhiteface made hay with white identity and privilege. It was an excellent show, as is its follow-up Lefty Tighty Righty Loosey, with which he again lays siege to the complacency of his (presumed to be) white, leftwing audience.

It begins with Taylor recalling his resolution to give up being leftwing for January; to stop, in other words, “being a whiney little bitch”. Leftwing people, he goes on, are dismissive, pedantic and smug. Labour has been captured by the middle classes, who can afford to be blase about actually winning. Virtue signalling is their (our?) obsession, alongside political correctness, which “is about demonising and shaming people”. You’ve probably already identified the problem with all this – as an argument, if not as comedy. In short, Taylor’s screed is a carnival of generalisations and misrepresentations. Again and again, he alights on legitimate arguments, then comes at them from the most extreme or crude available position. It’s fair enough to mock Stoke Newington’s (hipster, “ethical living”) local economy, but to argue that those communities “don’t know what reality is”, or that their lifestyles “aren’t making the world better, just making it worse in a different way”? Not so much. Likewise, the left’s lack of clarity on Islamic fundamentalism – that’s fair game, but Taylor’s assertion that “white liberals don’t want to criticise Saudi Arabia” is nonsense.

So where’s all this coming from? A provocateur’s impulse to get a rise out of his audience, or genuine political concern? It’s never clear how seriously Taylor wants us to take him, as the show flits from wild extrapolation from a kernel of truth to obvious shock-comedy – the routine about making abortion mandatory, say, or the one about white people (via slavery, which led to the blues) being responsible for all good music. And to an extent, it doesn’t matter. Yes, he might find himself making some unsavoury friends with this material. But Taylor is so emphatic a comic – playful, domineering, high joke count – it’s gripping to watch as he dances around his bonfire of proprieties.

Among the other lefty apostates on this year’s fringe, I haven’t see Chris McGlade’s show, which reportedly takes aim at PC and identity politics from a working-class perspective. I have seen Andrew Doyle at the Stand, whose show describes – with as easy a recourse to generalisation as Taylor’s – his post-Brexit falling out with all his liberal friends. Again, the bogeyman is the middle-class lefty, caricatured as ever as a privately educated, quinoa-guzzling exile from reality. Against them, Doyle claims – via a working-class grandad, seemingly – a hotline to the common man, whom the left now hates.

Doyle takes more pains than Taylor to carve out a coherent position on the anti-EU Corbynite left. But he shares the conviction that identity politics is just bourgeois entitlement, and that “we [ie the left] look stupid when we worry about this stuff”. Both acts seem to see class and identity politics as antipathetic, which needn’t be – and often isn’t – the case. Doyle does make good points here (if not always as good jokes) about name-calling in modern politics, and our inability to tolerate disagreement. But he needs to practise what he preaches. You can’t blame people for branding all Brexiters as stupid and simultaneously brand all lefties as snobs.

With that in mind, I do wonder how effective these shows are at starting the conversation they insist needs to happen. Elsewhere in town, Ahir Shah’s show argues just as angrily in favour of liberal values, and all these shows beg the question of whether, in these antagonistic, divisive times, we really need this kind of divisive, antagonistic comedy. Does joke-telling militate against nuance and sensitivity? Or is there such a thing as consensual political comedy, one that sheds more light than heat on our rancorous moment? (Ingrid Oliver’s show Speech, which ends in a plea for a less binary world, offers a glimpse of it.) In its absence, it remains exciting to see the faultlines in contemporary leftism probed in comedy – even if the comics in question seem less likely to bridge those faultlines than widen them.

• Fin Taylor is at The Tron until 27 August. Chris McGlade is at The Caves until 27 August. Andrew Doyle is at The Stand until 27 August. Ahir Shah is at Cabaret Voltaire until 27 August. Box office: 44 131 226 0000.