JAY LAFFERTY is in her element, working her lairy audience at Edinburgh’s Stand Comedy Club like a ring-master. In this subterranean crucible, a famous venue on Scotland’s busy comedy tour, there is nowhere to hide. This venue holds around 150 and tonight it’s absolutely hoaching. There’s no stage, as such: as soon as the comedians emerge they’re immediately up close and personal with an audience which doesn’t expect to be kept waiting for their laughs.

Lafferty alights upon a young and unwary couple and gently mocks their pleasant Canadaism. They’re in the midst of a two-month tour of Scotland and she tells them they’ve been on holiday longer than Liz Truss has been in office. She seeks out other nationalities and riffs off them too, before telling them that she herself is from Greenock. This being Edinburgh, Lafferty feels she must provide them with a sense of her home town. “Greenock makes Trainspotting look like In the Night Garden”, she tells them

She’s compering a three-woman show and you can’t help imagine that her fellow comedians waiting in the wings are beginning to sweat a little. All of them will need to be in top form to get as many laughs as Lafferty. It’s a sweary, earthy, rude and – occasionally– downright filthy tour de force and the audience is loving it.

She begins to tell them something of herself too and talks about what she calls her ten-year “IVF journey”. She recounts a rather startling and eye-watering anecdote about how best to keep sperm at the required room temperature. It features the words “spit” and “swallow”.

The chap beside me – beard, man-bun, boutique tattoo – winces as he steals an edgy glance at his male friend. For my part, I’m trying not to make eye contact with anyone whatsoever. Is that paint being stripped from the ceiling? There’s an audible gasp, followed by nervous laughter and then outright delight. It’s clear that several of those in here tonight are having their own fertility journeys.

Back-stage an hour earlier Jay Lafferty is talking about the pathos she says is at the heart of all good comedy. “I want to make people’s night more fun, but I know I’ve maybe touched a nerve with some people.

“I’ve tackled fertility and talked about it on-stage and I know – because I’ve seen the reactions in a room – that what I’ve said resonates with some of them. I see because I’ve lived through that. I know the look of women who’ve had multiple failures to try and get pregnant. I see it in their eyes. I’m trying to normalise something difficult by making it funny because things that are sh*t and hard and tough and difficult to endure are often very funny too.”

Lafferty has been doing stand-up for around 20 years and is one of the most recognisable faces on the circuit. I was once told by another Scottish comedian that she’s hugely admired by her fellow performers and the punters alike. “Jay is a very funny woman and widely respected in the trade. She never refuses a request for help and you know that if she’s on the bill it’ll be a memorable night. Many of us really look up to her.”

I tell her I’m in awe of those who practise this craft of spinning laughter out of normality. Night after night they must lay themselves out – body and soul – to satiate the most vital demand we can make of another: make me laugh.

“I love doing comedy with children and I’m involved in a Stand project where we visit primary schools and teach comedy as a tool for building confidence; creative writing; public speaking and team work. There are so many disciplines involved in it. When you’re a stand-up you can’t switch off but this is a great way to channel it. I’ve been working with children for a long time.”

She talks about working with a young mums group in Edinburgh’s edgy Pilton district and her delight at discovering some very funny and very talented women. “I was blown away by them,” she says. “Here were four young mums, all in their early 20s and I’m doing a sketch-writing thing course with with them.

“I’ve sat in sketch-rooms with straight white men, but these young women came up with seven great routines in 45 minutes. They were fresh, vibrant and very funny. It was a real privilege to be in that room with them. I immediately contacted the producers of BBC Shorts who have agreed to send a director out to work with them. And they’ll all get paid for it.”

At school where Lafferty first discovered she could make people laugh, the comedy circuit was still largely the preserve of straight, white men. She remembers being voted the class clown, but had discovered too that comedy was a good antidote to bullying. “All comedians have been bullied at some point and humour is a good way out of it.

“I started at 21 when there were very few women. You’d sometimes face an audience and see blokes immediately fold their arms as soon as a woman came on stage, but that changed when they began to laugh. I mean, it’s always difficult trying to withhold laughter.”

Tonight it’s an all-woman bill and she remembers when this was considered something to be patronised. “It was all ‘let’s give the girls a shot because it’s International Women’s Day’. Now it’s not even mentioned. Whenever there were two women on the bill I would say: ‘Oh, there’s two women on the bill: there must be some Creative Scotland funding’.”

She’s ambivalent about the debate surrounding what’s considered too offensive at a time when firing-squads haunt social media and public platforms seeking new ways to be offended.

“Certainly there are things you wouldn’t say now that you might have ventured some years ago,” she says. “And any comedian who says otherwise is lying. Society is always developing and progressing and we, like other sectors of society, have to change with it. But I treasure the fact that just as there are more women doing comedy there are also more trans comedians; gay comedians and people with disabilities or conditions talking about their autism or their ADHD. However, there are also loads of straight, white males who are very funny. The comedy pitch is big enough for all of us to have a good kick at the ball.”

I’ve always felt that we ought to grant comedians a wider licence to offend. And that by doing this they often highlight and target our own prejudices and the way we treat more vulnerable groups in society. “In history, court jesters were the comedians of their time, often employed to puncture pomposity and relieve political tension by saying things that couldn’t be said but everyone was thinking.

“But I think we should be punching up, not down. People who put propel themselves into positions of power and authority are all fair game. But when you start joking about situations or conditions in which you have no life experience and no skin in the game it can turn into bullying.”

“But if you’re going to see Frankie Boyle or Jerry Sadowitz you should also know what to expect.”

Ah yes: Jerry Sadowitz. I was hoping she might bring him up. The viperish Glasgow comedian and magician has been shocking and delighting audiences for around 40 years, but it was only this summer that the Gilded Balloon, one of Edinburgh’s top Fringe venues, decided he was too hot to handle.

“If you’re going to see Jerry – and he’s been doing this for such a long time – you know what you’re going to see. But sometimes the media get hold of something and blow it all out of proportion. There can be a blurred and fine line between what actually happened and what was reported.”

She tells me about the comedian’s worst nightmare: people walking out of your show. “A couple sat at the front of my Fringe show in 2019. And then, 10 minutes before the end, the woman gets up and I’m thinking she’s just gone to the bathroom – but it was at quite a poignant part of the show – and so I asked her man if she was okay and he said: “I think we’re in the wrong show; it was the magician we were looking for.”