BRITAIN’S comics are thriving while its economy does just the reverse. Attendance at comedy shows held in arenas has increased ninefold since 2007. Channel 4 has tripled the hours it devotes to broadcasting comedy over the past three years. Ticket sales for the Edinburgh Fringe festival, where comedy accounts for a third of the acts, have doubled since 2003, reaching 1.9m last year.

Comics first hit the big stage in the early 1990s, when Robert Newman and David Baddiel performed at Wembley Arena, and making people laugh was proclaimed the new rock ’n’ roll. This marked a coming together of the alternative comedy scene, which took off in the Thatcherite 1980s, and the mainstream it mocked. But the advances comedy made then do not compare with its surge now.

Stand-up comics are leading the way, a change from the past dominance of television by sit-coms and sketch shows. Producers are bewitched by the rock-bottom cost of deploying a single man (usually) with a mic, just as in the music industry singer-songwriters are said to be outdoing more expensive bands. Ed Bartlam of Underbelly, an entertainment firm, thinks the turning point was in 2008, when the BBC replaced Jonathan Ross’s Friday-night chat show with comic Michael McIntyre fronting “Live at the Apollo”. Broadcast to 3.5m viewers, it introduced a new audience to stand-up.

The bigger names have less time for television than others, as they need to keep their material fresh for the arena shows that are increasingly on offer, points out Shane Allen, head of comedy for Channel 4. So television is constantly in search of new talent. There are more comedy scouts than ever these days at the Edinburgh Fringe, says Jon Thoday of Avalon, a talent-management company.

But comics’ commercial success has its critics. Stewart Lee, a curmudgeonly stalwart of alternative comedy, recently attacked the way that hopefuls are now spending over £10,000 apiece in their attempts to get noticed at the Fringe. Some clubs have been a victim of the televised boom. Jongleurs, a chain of cut-price venues, has closed several. Smaller provincial clubs that cannot offer household names fare even worse.

America suffered from an overdose of stand-up comedy in the early 1990s. As audiences tired of predictable routines, television networks dropped stand-up acts and comedy clubs shut down. Can Britain’s comics avoid that fate? Innovation is key, and the internet helps by increasing the exposure of pioneers. Mark Tughan, who founded the Glee Club group based in Birmingham, thinks spectators have become more discerning, thanks mainly to a younger generation who have grown up watching comedy online. Promising stuff.