Truth scams - do humour and honesty mix?

It's probably not an issue that occurs to most of us - given that some of the most powerful people on the planet just seem to regularly make stuff up nowadays - but do we expect comedians to tell the truth? When someone on stage mines real life for material, does it matter if that tale is a bit tall?

Now comedians aren't teachers, and the very concept of a joke involves a certain amount of deception, or we'd spot every punchline coming a mile away. But the role of the comedian has evolved over the years, and in a world where even the most scrupulously balanced news outlets are frequently accused of bias, comics are increasingly viewed as more reliable voices. In the States in particular, The Daily Show's Jon Stewart became a vital source of information for many viewers, as indeed have his former correspondents, John Oliver and Samantha Bee, on their subsequent shows Last Week Tonight and Full Frontal.

By making big subjects accessible, political comics are a potent weapon when it comes to challenging powerful figures about their trustworthiness, and even acts whose material is fairly neutral may still tackle big issues on social media. You do wonder if the whoppers those comics tell on stage could then come back to bite them, however. Not that there's a watchdog for this sort of thing. If a TV advert seems untrue you report it to the ASA. You can check the honesty of online gaming sites at Scams.info. But as yet there isn't a Gag Standard Authority to check the veracity of a comedian's stories.

This does occasionally come up within the comedy industry and media as a whole though, particularly if a well-known comic makes a wild accusation about another public figure. Usually such comments are so obviously silly that only the really committedly ignorant could mistake them for the truth, but sometimes a spurious story will be pulled out of context and look pretty weird or callous, on the page. Having to painstakingly explain jokes afterwards is one of life's most soul-destroying activities.

Sometimes it works the other way, and a comic will actually make a valid point about a well-known figure, then have it written off as a gag - until the truth eventually emerges. There's at least one very famous occurrence in recent years of an extremely unpleasant celeb being revealed as such by a British comedian years before the celeb passed away and became posthumously infamous. Then everyone wondered why nobody spoke up about him at the time. Actually, a comedian did, but nobody took enough notice.

A similar situation reared up a few months ago, when the Weinstein allegations belatedly alerted us to an on-the-nose 'joke' Seth MacFarlane made about the disgraced movie producer during the 2013 Oscar nominations ceremony. He'd actively included it to raise the issue, but a lot of us only became aware that the gag ever happened when the story was everywhere anyway, five years on. Funny that.

So, comedians are believed when they're joking, and ignored when being candid - but what about the regular, everyday anecdotal comic? If you're telling a funny story that purports to be true, does it have to be, all the way through?

You can't really expect comedians to stick rigidly to the facts, but then a storyteller blatantly making stuff up can seem pretty pointless. And that's where the seasoned performers stand out, weaving such a compelling world that the embellishments are indistinguishable from the real stuff, and it's all so entertainingly told that nobody minds anyway. Indeed, the real artists - Lee, Kendall, Acaster - will often toy with that honesty/fantasy dynamic, to mind-boggling effect. True story.