As the third most consistently critically acclaimed British standup comedian of the 21st century, I usually spend my summers at the Edinburgh fringe, trying to intimidate younger comedians into quitting while simultaneously manicuring my own legend.

I have attended the metrosexual arts event every August since 1987, except for 2001, when I was too broke to go, as a result of having performed there at a loss for the previous 14 years while a client of a complex arts management company and backdoor wealth funnel, which locked would-be comedians into a Jim Crow-style debt cycle, like pierrot slaves in a salt mine full of jokes.

But the world stage upon which the conceptual clowning, close magic and gender-bending entertainment events of this year’s fringe are enacted is very different to that of 29 years ago. So much has changed.

Back in 1987, for example, the baiji, or Chinese river dolphin, had not yet been made extinct by the Chinese land human. By way of contrast, fringe discovery Jack Whitehall, the English land human, had not even been born.

My funny impression of Michael Gove, for which I had learned knife throwing from a circus performer, was irrelevant

Future historians will find it bewildering to think that there was a 19-year period when these two extraordinary creatures both inhabited the same planet; Jack’s extensive social media presence perhaps even making the last Chinese river dolphin dimly aware of the young standup comedian’s second place near-victory in the 2007 Laughing Horse New Act of the Year competition.

In 1987 there was no internet, no social media and no PR industry, and fringe shows were advertised, if at all, by photocopied bits of paper stuck to walls. This non-demographically targeted promotion method appears to today’s young entertainment entrepreneurs as archaic as simply putting the name of a show into a bottle and throwing it into the sea. But it worked. Some shows back then even became a success off the back of “word of mouth”, the human voice being a sort of 1980s version of Twitter.

The Edinburgh festival, and its illegitimate bastard the fringe, both began in 1947 as an attempt, in the words of its co-founder Rudolf Bing, to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” and to enrich the cultural consciousness of Scotland, Britain and Europe in the aftermath of the second world war.

It is unlikely that Bing’s vision of the flowering of the human spirit encompassed the annual August success of the Basildon swearing electro-pop comedian Kunt and the Gang. But I like to think that even Rudolf Bing could not have resisted tapping his toe to Kunt’s tragicomic internet hit, A Lonely Wank in a Travelodge.

It is also unlikely that Rudolf Bing, having survived to watch a shattered Europe stitch itself back together, would have imagined the festival and the fringe taking place, 69 years later, against the backdrop of a rapidly unravelling Europe, and it has been fascinating to attend my first post-Brexit fringe in my first post-Brexit Edinburgh.

Viewed through the lens of post-Brexit anxiety, everything in the city seems altered. I met a young man at a traditional music session in the Captains Bar who was leaving London to study philosophy in Scotland, which seemed to make sense.

England has forsworn so-called “experts” with their so-called “knowledge”, but here in Edinburgh the young scholar can walk to work each day past traffic cone-crowned statues of great thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith and Greyfriars Bobby, their belief in the usefulness of thought still valued by their host nation.

In 1530 the prudish Council of Trent insisted on covering the genitals of classical statues with fig leaves, or removing their reproductive organs altogether. In post-Brexit England how long will it be before statues of figures such as Darwin, Newton and Hobbes, in public defiance of reason and demonstrable fact, are forcibly relieved of their thought-harbouring heads by angry chisel-wielding mobs?

Writing in Le Monde diplomatique, the journalist Paul Mason reported a Welsh railway worker explaining he would vote to leave the EU because “you can’t buy girls pink toys any more, they have to be grey”. And while the Leave win is good news for people employed by companies that supply pink paints to Welsh girls’ toy makers, for many in the manufacturing industry, not least of all Edinburgh fringe standup comedians like myself, it has created problems.

My own new touring show, which I began work on in May, fell apart in the wake of Brexit, as key personalities or value systems I imagined I would be able to ridicule for money until the end of the current show’s touring cycle, in April 2018, disappeared overnight from public consciousness; the body politic lacerating itself in a fatal bout of self-harm, which was only really meant to get the European boys’ attention.

My funny impression of Michael Gove, for example, for which I had learned knife throwing from a cowboy circus performer, and hideously disfigured my own face by squeezing it into a plastic mould of a mandrill’s bottom, was instantly irrelevant. Two months after Brexit, even Dan Hannan himself barely remembers who he is.

In the immediate Brexit aftershock, I toyed with making the whole show about Brexit, but as I cannot say how Brexit will pan out during the proposed show’s near two-year life cycle, or how public attitudes to it will change during that period, there seems little point in writing too much live material about it, and I do not see the value in committing to a course of action for which there is no obvious financial or intellectual justification.

Every August I take the kids to the Edinburgh Museum to see the mighty Millennium clock tower, which wasn’t even built when I first visited the city. Assembled in 1999 by Tim Stead, Eduard Besudsky, Annica Sandström, Jürgen Tübbecke and Maggy Lenert, it is a fantastical 30-foot-high depiction of the horrors of the 20th century; those same horrors Rudolf Bing, who fled the Nazis and founded the festival, hoped cultural communication could help prevent. It also tells the time, the perfect fusion of form and function.

On the hour, every hour, chattering, demonic wooden monkeys lurch into life at the behest of dictatorial demagogues, representations of man’s finest qualities weakly rotating far beyond their reach. High atop the clock, donkeys swing bells from their mouths, exciting the gibbering apes. I thought of Boris and Gove, the notion of dog-whistle politics being rather too subtle a term for the clanging brass bongs of their calculated lies, and the clock’s apocalyptic summation of the last century suddenly seemed like the most relevant thing I’d seen all month.