Has there been a rise in rightwing comedy? Or just more acts pinning their colours to that mast? A common claim – flogged to death by the conservative commentariat – is that comedy is dominated by a “liberal elite”. That was always a tenuous premise: beyond the late Jeremy Hardy, the Marks Steel and Thomas, and mid-career Josie Long, where are all these socialist clowns we keep hearing about? But it’s looking even more ragged now. Since journeyman standup Geoff Norcott had the bright idea of relaunching himself as a Tory and became a fixture on Question Time, other acts have followed suit. Anti-woke is the fringe pose du jour, not infrequently struck by comics out and proud about their rightwing affiliations.

They draw their charge – such as it is – from the conceit that they’re fearlessly flouting tyrannical orthodoxy. But the idea that it’s Transgressive – the title of Scottish comic Leo Kearse’s show – to PC-bash in public is a bit of a stretch. Ricky Gervais, Dave Chappelle, Jimmy Carr: comedy arenas are full of this stuff. You can’t open the papers or turn on TV without hearing anti-woke and pro-Brexit sentiment. If – as these comics insist – free speech is under attack, it’s a pretty feeble attack. Although it did succeed in having Kearse’s previous show, Right-Wing Comedian, cancelled in Australia last year after protests about its alleged transphobia.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Right-on … Konstantin Kisin. Photograph: Steve Ullathorne

Perhaps that’s why “we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing these days”, as Konstantin Kisin puts it. Kisin made the headlines last year by refusing to perform at a London university after being asked to sign a “behavioural agreement” relating to the content of his act. (He doesn’t mention that the organiser swiftly apologised.) He raises some legitimate questions in a show exploring why 3,300 people were arrested in the UK last year for things they said on social media.

He also contradicts himself. We mustn’t call people we disagree with Nazis, he says – then ends with a George Carlin quote equating political correctness with fascism. The politics of Dominic Frisby’s show Libertarian Love Songs (Frisby is standing as a prexit Party candidate for parliament) are likewise all over the place. Ukulele in hand, he sings that “all taxation is theft”, then criticises Amazon for not paying its taxes. He criticises the ubiquitous blandness of modern Britain, then croons a hymn to Wetherspoons.

But the show has its charms. Frisby emerges more as contrarian English eccentric than reactionary. His rant about “crony capitalism”, and the sweet ending to his song about hate speech, both suggest common ground between Frisby’s anti-corporate shtick and the politics of the bolshiest social justice warrior of rightwing demonology.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alice Marshall as Titania McGrath. Photograph: David Windmill

Time was, of course, progressive fringe audiences might have rejected even a whiff of Toryism in their comedy. Only five years ago, Jim Davidson felt like an outlier here – although he played in a major venue and was widely reviewed. But we’re all more mindful of diversity and inclusion these days – and rightist comics are cashing in on the affirmative action. Kisin, Kearse and Frisby’s shows were well attended on my visits, and fair enough: they can be entertaining, and put forward the occasional intelligent point of view. Not so Titania McGrath, the fictional Twitter avatar of comedian Andrew Doyle – now incarnated at the fringe by comic Alice Marshall. Fitfully amusing online, McGrath is a crude caricature on stage, a mean-spirited and largely witless burlesque of millennial wokeness.

The show’s presiding idea is that the left is building a gulag out of PC terminology and ever-changing gender pronouns. Spoiler alert: that isn’t true. But there are pertinent conversations to have – and jokes to make – about where we draw the lines around offensive and illegal, between acceptable jokes and hateful acts. Kisin wonders how the defence of free speech became “a far-right dog whistle”, and it’s a good question. It’s traditionally a progressive cause, and some of the best comedy in Edinburgh on wokeness and new sensitivities around language are from leftwing comics – like Ahir Shah, say, with his routine on the phrase “people of colour” (“as if I’m indistinguishable from a black woman”).

If there’s debate around whether woke-bashing is an exclusively rightwing pursuit, there’s none around the Tory credentials of Sarah Southern’s show on the Free Fringe. Southern was the Conservative aide who resigned in 2012 after the so-called “cash for access” scandal. Now she’s doing standup about her love of Mrs Thatcher, her time in David Cameron’s employ and her fall from grace. The promised interrogation of where she now stands politically never quite materialises, beyond a lame disavowal of the actual record of the government she helped precipitate. (“Some of their policies don’t sit well with me”)

But if hers is a low-wattage show, it’s not objectionable. Nor does it – or any of the shows mentioned – herald a new rightward direction for standup. There may be those who consider rightwing comedy oxymoronic because comedy mustn’t punch down, and punching down is what rightwingery is all about. But there have always been comics who do that, or who trade in chauvinist stereotypes, or promote individualist values. (As Leo Kearse points out: standup is the ne plus ultra Thatcherite industry.) Kearse, Frisby and co are just the latest in their line. All that’s changed – after Norcott banished the stigma, and advertised the career benefits, of calling oneself rightwing – is the branding.