I have developed a suspicion, and it’s growing, that I can identify what podcasts a comedian is listening to within the first five minutes of watching their set.

It isn’t in the jokes; not how good they are or how they’re delivered (though the rhythms of the internet increasingly worm their way into live performances until it becomes evident that some performers aren’t performing to the people in the room as much as they’re trying to gather viral clips like a squirrel in summer.) 

The thing that makes me think I have this magical sorting power is the premises. Or the pre-premises. The starting points feel familiar. 

When I started doing comedy (back in my day being increasingly further back), it was still the era where you’d have really a maximum of one woman on any given bill. I used to joke that they didn’t want more than one of us on ‘lest we start talking about the sex pests’, and then they did let more of us on, and then we DID start talking about the sex pests, (#Metoo, #notallmen).

If you really want to place my start date in comedy, it was just as the idea that one ethnic man was swappable into the same one ‘slot’ as the one woman was going out of vogue, but before having more than three Daves on a bill started to seem a bit weird, and just before boomers started to create the conceptual space to include non-binary and gender expansive players. Yes, I’m that old. 

At the same time, and I believe not coincidentally, there was a stereotype in the open mic scene that all women talked about the same stuff. It was always not very true, but it was sometimes a little bit true, and where it was true, I began to realise, was that the open mic women were responding to the acts they saw around them, who were all open mic men. We weren’t seeing very many other women perform, and so we didn’t always know what was already being said by other women. 

To go a bit broader, back in the day,  a few times I had the joy of going to watch acts in ‘newer’ comedy scenes in places without a big stand-up culture. This feature of newer comedy scenes has changed a bit with the huge homogenising effect of YouTube and reels, but trust me bro, I saw it. The open mic nights would feel weirdly old fashioned; almost like you’d traveled back in time. Not quite but almost ‘take my wife’ jokes. A lot of ‘x kind of people are like THIS, while y kind of people are like THAT’. 

It was amazing because it made me really nail down for myself how much of comedy - how much of art, is just doing something new in answer to the thing you just saw. Like, I won’t do this, because they’re already doing that, so I’ll do this instead. 

For example, when I started out, I probably saw three women in a row (over a few weeks, spread out between line-ups as they were), start their sets with ‘so my husband…’/‘so my girlfriend….’ [footnote: yes, before gay marriage] / ‘so I’m single…’. As a result, I swore an oath to my friend Benita that I would never talk about my personal sex life or relationships on stage. 

I have kept that promise to Benita, even through the having of two children (I think the line I used on stage was - ‘I have acquired a child’), and I think I’ve been forced to make more interesting comedy as a result. 

All of which brings me back to the question of why I think I can identify podcast-and-algorithm-ecosystems by someone’s set. This is the cost of a limited media diet. It’s not that the material is hack, exactly. It’s that I go ‘Oh! this guy’s material is occupying the same space in the linear timeline of the conversation that is The Arts as those other guys.’

A joke should feel like a discovery, to some degree. Or I’m wary of saying ‘should be’. I tend to like jokes where it feels like the performer has gone out into uncharted wilderness, encountered a bunch of stuff, thought about it deeply, and then brought back their artistic conclusions. 

Like I’m seeing new vistas though the lens of their creative mind, with the seasoning of finding their place within current trends in performance and what other acts around them are doing. 

Instead, I’m watching a man perform his first thoughts in response to a three-hour conversation he felt like he was part of because he experienced it with his earbuds in, and it’s the same first response as six other people I’ve seen this week and yet I’m expected to be surprised by the ending.

I don’t know, maybe I’m projecting, but it feels like a thing. I want acts who read. Who watch old things, or unpopular things, or consume only beat poetry for six months before they write their show. I want mixed-up digestion of half-baked ideas, and exciting stuff being explored on stage. 

And don’t get me wrong, there are such acts around. John-Luke Roberts, Joz Norris, Eleanor Morton, Paul Foot, Adele Cliff. I adore them, I seek them out. I want more of them, or rather more people who are responding to them and other acts and their own weird lives rather than it feeling like there are a bundle of acts all jumping off the same little square of thought. 

I want comedians to think about their intellectual diets; to refuse the temptation to have their thoughts pre-chewed and spat into their mouths. I want acts who are able to function as fully-formed whole human beings in a world where every single one of our most basic human impulses are being machinegunned by ultra-processed infoslop and frictionless consumption-hacked dopamaxxing scrollbait. 

The existence of algorithms have us all fooled into thinking we can know what we’ll like based on stuff we already like. In a world of AI and prediction markets, I think maybe the only way to make stuff is to get unpredictable, unprecedented, glitchy. Wipe your cookies and start a new path through everything. 

I want acts to break out a bit; try something completely out of pocket. Set up a YouTube burner account. Play Russian Roulette with the podcast subscribe button. Surprise me!

• Alice Fraser: Oh Man! is on at Monkey Barrel Comedy at O'Neill's (The Tron) at 20:40