CATHERINE Bohart is sipping coffee that is “barely coffee,” (her preference) in a café in Holyrood Road in Edinburgh and thinking about the difference between the comedian she is now and the comedian she was 12 months ago.

“I guess the difference is, this year stand-up is my job,” she says. “Last year it was becoming my job.”

Not so long ago the Irish-born, London-based comedian was teaching debating in school. Today, she’s prepping for her third night of her Fringe run at the Pleasance. To watch her now is to see a comedian full of confidence and brio. Someone, in short, who knows how to do the job.

Some 12 months ago she was in Edinburgh to talk about her OCD and being the queer daughter of an Irish Catholic Deacon. This time around, it’s bisexuality and her sex-positive mother. “Last year, dad and women. This year mum and d***,” she sums up succinctly.

Other things Bohart talks about in her hour at Edinburgh this year; her partner Sarah Keyworth (who’s also a comedian and performing in Edinburgh), lesbian bed death, Netflix profiles, the impossibility of body positivity, homophobia and biphobia. Oh, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

The result is playful, provocative, at times filthy, but always funny. And deeply personal. What was it like the first time you got up and did this show, I ask her? “Terrifying. Oh my gosh, petrifying.”

And yet here she is. On stage and talking about herself. It’s not necessarily a totally deliberate choice. “It’s more like,” she says, “‘It’s January, I’d better start of thinking of something to say.’ And then suddenly it’s May, and you go: ‘That’s a lot of sex about my sex life.’”

There’s an August punchline that goes here too, but this it’s so post-watershed the sun is blearily shining down on it. Reader, I blushed.

Bohart passes the first test of any self-respecting comedian. She makes you laugh. But she does more than that. She is speaking out, too. Maybe that’s the Deacon’s daughter in her.

“I think as an audience member,” she says, “I want to feel something. That doesn’t mean I want to be told what to feel. But I want to feel something. Why have you been talking for an hour if you don’t have anything to say?”

Does she feel a responsibility to be visible? “As a bi person? I guess I have always felt that I had to be visible. If anything, I find it easier now than I did when I first came out. I came out 11 years ago in Ireland. Gay marriage wasn’t legal.”

Biphobia doesn’t only come from straight people either, she points out. The old “pick a team” line. “I once had a police officer in my audience in Canal Street in Manchester and it was a gay night with a largely lesbian clientele in this bar and I said I was bi, and she booed.”

The star of this year’s show is her mother. It’s a measure of generational difference, I tell her, that I don’t ever remember my mum talking about orgasms over breakfast. That’s a common response, she says.

“Some go ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe your mum would ever say that to your face.’ Or people are like: ‘Thank you. My mum is also smutty.

“The thing is my mum is also genuinely very religious. She’s just very enthusiastic about talking about sex. She also worked in hospitals her whole life, so she’s very like: ‘If children are old enough to ask, they’re old enough to know. But if they’re asking, why not tell them everything.’

“She’s one of the few members of my family that I don’t have to do any rewriting. I just say what she said, and people go: ‘What?’

“It annoys me sometimes her line gets bigger laughs than mine,” she adds laughing. “But I’m sure glad she says them because it’s quite useful.”

Bohart loves Edinburgh. She gets to see Sarah for a start. “It’s the only month of the year that we’re in the same city every night. I feel quite grounded here”

It’s also where she fell in love with comedy, she says. Ask her about her comedy heroes and she raves about Dylan Moran and Michelle Wolff. They are a measure of how far there still is to go.

“I’m not the comedian I want to be yet. I don’t think I will be for a long time, which is the exciting part.”

Ambition, she says, is not the dirty word she used to think it was. “Certainly, this would be very dull without it. Otherwise why the hell are you getting a Megabus to Northampton?”

Catherine Bohart: Lemon is on at the Pleasance Courtyard at 6pm until August 26 (except August 13)