As the audience files in, James Bond title songs accompany a looped clip from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, which was George Lazenby’s sole outing as 007. There’s a reason, as this funny, touching but wholly unsentimental show is a sort of comic tribute to Des Bishop’s father, Mike, who auditioned for the role after Sean Connery hung up his Walther PPK in 1968.

Normally, comedy critics maintain the polite convention of not writing comics’ jokes in reviews - it spoils the fun for punters if they then see the show and already know the punchline. But even if this review was peppered with gags from Tim Vine’s Joke-amotive, they would represent only a tiny percentage of the astonishing number of funnies he gets through in his set. Puns, one-liners, surreal wordplay, sight gags and musical jokes follow each other in rapid succession as the pace never slackens in his 75-minute set.

Micky Flanagan was a jobbing club comic for a few years before he shot to stardom with his first full-length Edinburgh Fringe show in 2007, for which he was nominated for a newcomer award at the grand age of 42. The show, What Chance Change?, charted his move from working-class herbert (or ’erbert in Flanagan’s deliciously cockney pronunciation) into middle-class ponce, now living in leafy suburbia and au fait with all things delicatessen, including sundried tomatoes and £5 loaves of bread.

Andy Parsons can do angry, baffled, sarky. He can have a swing and hit a bullseye. Take this, Alan Sugar. Take that, Ryanair. But you wonder, is he too happy for greatness? The title of the show he’s currently touring hints at a cheery disposition. Gruntled, leaving off the negative prefix, begrudgingly suggests an essentially contented world view. So too (without wishing to stereotype) does the loamy accent he carries with him from a childhood spent in the South West. Either I’m misreading the signs – for which I can only apologise - or he is unafflicted by neurosis, egotism and insecurity. These qualities are not attractive in friends and family, but they are rocket fuel to a comic.

At first sight there seems to be little to connect these two comics - one a performance artist who spends much of her show in her underwear, the other a self-described 34-year-old virgin - who are touring with their 2010 Edinburgh Fringe shows, except that they are both currently appearing in the same studio space at the Soho Theatre in London. But having been underwhelmed after seeing their shows back to back, I see similarities - my notes contain the common scribblings “weak material” and “overlong anecdotes” - and I'm frustrated by the realisation that both have some cracking gags among the obvious and trite stuff that forms the majority of their acts.

Scotland certainly loves its comedy. In addition to the month-long bliss that is the Edinburgh Fringe, just along the M8 Glasgow has been providing its own few weeks of fun since 2003. Their comedy festival has a very different feel to it - less of a comics’ gathering (they do one-nighters rather than residencies) and more of a busy schedule - but it’s all very enjoyable even so. Last night I saw local boy Scott Agnew, a 6ft 5in gay Glaswegian - not a phrase I have the opportunity to write very often.

Many of you will know Ed Byrne from his appearances on BBC shows such as Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You, where his sardonic take on current affairs marks him out as a sharp-tongued and quick-witted comic. Now he’s touring with a new show, Crowd Pleaser, which I saw at the Anvil in Basingstoke; like his previous live work, it’s another well-constructed evening of smart observational comedy.

Ruby Wax has packed a lot into her life - writer, actor, stand-up comic, television interviewer, to name a few. But possibly her greatest professional achievement will be her work in mental health, prompted by her own experiences of depression, which has led to a BBC series about the subject and her current studies for an MSc at Oxford. And now she has devised a theatre show with musician Judith Owen that’s funny, warm and inventive and takes as its starting point the fact that one in four of us suffers a mental-health problem at some time in our lives.

It takes a certain something to make a roomful of white people get their funk on. I feel I have dispensation to make that ridiculous generalisation because Lenny Henry, famously born in Dudley to immigrant Jamaican parents, addresses the whiteness of the room the minute he comes on stage at Bromley’s Churchill Theatre, and by the end of this biographical show - part comedy, part music - the entire audience is on their feet, strutting their stuff to “Sex Machine” and “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now”.

Jimmy Carr, a comedian who has more than once got into hot water over jokes that some find offensive, does a very strange thing for the encore of his latest show, Laughter Therapy - he gives a lecture cum homily on the limits of offensiveness, and how anything is permissible if the audience allows it. “I know my jokes are cruel and brutal and unacceptable,” he says. “But they have only one purpose - to make you laugh.”