Job v. Career v. Hobby

I'm in Edinburgh for a few days to check out the 2010 Festival and catch up with some people who are performing up here. Unless I run into someone on the street who makes me an offer I can't refuse this will be the first Fringe I've been to since 2001 as a non-performer. I'm in need of inspiration not experience.

One interpretation of the festival is that this is when you focus on comedy as your career rather than just as your job. This is the month you perform your amazing, personal, funny-yet-poignant show that'll take you away from the Mirth Control / Jongleurs grind forever. That nice woman from the BBC is going to fall in love with you and change your life forever. Otherwise on Friday week you're back at your job: trying to get the attention of a hundred-strong mass of stag parties in Bristol.

That's the theory anyway. In practice there are too many excruciatingly revelatory hours with too few jokes and a legion of clever-not-funny double-acts and sketch troupes. 2,400 different shows. The aggregate amount of time devoted to writing and rehearsing all of these carefully crafted masterpieces over the last eleven months is mind-blowing. And many of them will be starting the whole process again in a week.

Because that's the third option: performing at the Edinburgh Fringe is your hobby. It's the thing you do that defined you as different from your (non-performing) workmates.

The shortlist for the Fosters Comedy Award (aka 'the Perrier') is published tomorrow. Making that list is genuinely life-changing. Everyone else is going back to a job of some sort on the 31st.