A funny thing happened at Ed Byrne's Riverside gig last week. Well a few funny things actually, because it was a pretty good show. But the funny thing I refer to here m'lud was Byrne coming back onstage to do an encore. After a month of shows in Edinburgh where acts do their allotted hour and then get out sharpish this was a genuine surprise. I had almost forgotten that theatre shows usually include an obligatory add-on at the end.

This did get me thinking though. Do punters really appreciate this tired old convention when they all know it's usually fake and what they are really seeing is the last ten minutes of the scripted act? Byrne jokingly referred to the artifice of the encore while still doing it and then earlier this week at the Bloomsbury Theatre Mark Watson dispensed with any pretence at all. He just said he was finished and was going to get offstage now, except for briefly hiding in the wings before coming back on to take modest bow rather than tell more jokes.

There has been a bit of talk in the blogosphere about the length of rock gigs recently and comedy is in the same artistic ballpark. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing and when a performer has done, say, 50 minutes of comedy either side of an interval, is an extra 10 minutes really necessary? Comedy is also like theatre and Ken Branagh doesn't do his favourite ten minutes of Ivanov again when he gets a standing ovation.

Yet successful comedy shows feel duty bound to do an encore. Little Britain's live extravanganza concluded with an all-singing, all-dancing costume change return featuring Matt Lucas as only gay in the village Daffyd and David Walliams in a PVC policeman's outfit, complete with shiny hotpants. Hardly the sort of thing that could have been made up on the spot.

On the other hand an encore can sometimes feel like a nice bonus. Like going to Somerfields to buy some Tetley Tea Bags and finding that they are giving away an extra 50% (which curiously enough happened to me at the weekend, oh my glamorous life is one long hedonistic party...). But genuinely spontaneous moments are few and far between.

In fact when I think about encores the funniest ones were the ones that shouldn't even have happened. Such as when the performer - no names, no pack drill - rushed back on after a lukewarm gig to do their totally unplanned encore and had to be quick because the so-called tumultuous applause was already dying away. Best of all though was the gig when a famous comedian - who shall be nameless for the sake of his career – stepped back onstage just as four people in the front row were ostentatiously putting their coats on. Maybe it was time for him to get his coat too...

Couldn't afford the time or the money for the 800-mile Edinburgh round-trip for the full-on comedy festival experience this summer? Fear not, there's something a little closer to home. Starting tonight a return train ticket to the north Kent coast will get you to the Whitstable Winkle Festival – no relation to the famous Whitstable Oyster Festival. Terrible name, but on the bright side some of the best comedy acts fresh from the Fringe – and some who had the good sense not to upset their bank manager by heading north this year – will be getting some late summer sea air in this tiny but trendy resort.

Tea shops, cafes and bars will be echoing with laughter over the next four days. And it is all indoors so there is no need to worry about the weather. Though, of course, the great law of sod means that Kent in late September will be considerably drier than Prince's Street in August.

Among the highlights this Friday are Boothy Graffoe, who didn't do Edinburgh this year, plus Richard Herring and Pappy's Fun Club who did and got great reviews. On Saturday another Edinburgh 2008 refusenik Adam Bloom is headlining while Milton Jones will also be doing the honours. And for anyone down in the afternoon there is a screening of Sarah Silverman's taboo-tickling movie Jesus Is Magic. On Sunday there is even an inevitable awards ceremony, which is nice, though I don't think it is ever going to rival the if.comedy awards for controversy and career-making.

The Whitstable Winkle is the brainchild of resident Steve Graham, who did a bit of stand-up in the seventies and now runs a local ice-cream parlour. There are no big-shot sponsors, though the council has chipped in £750. It is a nice way for the comedy festival season to bow out. Except, of course, the comedy season never takes a final bow these days. There is only another two weeks to go before the Brighton Comedy Festival and then we start gearing up for Melbourne, Kilkenny, Montreal, lots more medium-sized fests...and then Edinburgh again.

Anyway, good for Whitstable. Let's hope this becomes an annual event. But please, oh please, think of a better name. The current name sounds silly and is even more annoying because I've never liked winkles. But maybe that's just me being shellfish.

Russell Brand for President? Unlikely – particularly as he is not an American citizen – but he certainly put the cat among the Presidential pigeons by declaring his support for Barack Obama while hosting the MTV Awards at the weekend. Brand reportedly said: "People of America, please elect Barack Obama... I know America to be a forward thinking country, right, because otherwise would you have let that retarded cowboy fella be president for eight years? We thought it was nice of you to let him have a go because in England George Bush wouldn’t be trusted with a pair of scissors."

Now comedians everywhere have been indulging in Bush-bashing ever since George W's dad was in the White House, but Brand did it in front of a big audience. Whether it was calculated or not it has certainly put him slap bang into the US consciousness in a way that his appearance in Forgetting Sarah Marshall could never have hoped to achieve. Message boards everywhere have lit up with questions about this strange man with bird's nest hair.

The question now is will Brand be a flash in the pan or will he be able to capitalise on his notoriety? With various movies in the pipeline he really has a chance to break through. When I interviewed him in his early days he said he wanted to crack Hollywood I wondered if the former drug addict was more interested in "crack" than "Hollywood". Now I can see that his sights are clearly set on global superstardom and he might just do it. He obviously has pretty good friends in high places to have landed the MTV presenting gig. Combine those connections with his undisputed, albeit idiosyncratic, talent and you've got a winning ticket.

Anyway, good on Brand for shaking up the Americans. It is always exciting when someone shoves a dose of reality into their faces. Whether Barack would like to have someone as colourful as Brand supporting him is another conundrum altogether – and I'd like to hear Obama wriggle out of that one – but it certainly made good television. As I said at the outset, he can't be President because he is not an American citizen so the constitution won't allow it. But with someone as ambitious as Brand a little thing like the law of the land is not likely to stand in his way. Anyone for a Russell Brand/Hillary Clinton joint campaign in 2012?

It was truly shocking to hear that comedy executive Geofffrey Perkins had been killed in a road accident on Friday. Early reports suggest he collapsed in the road in Marylebone High Street and was hit by a truck. It was particularly disturbing as I'd heard about the accident on the lunchtime news and had not given it much thought before discovering the victim was this talented 55 -year-old via text during the evening.

I didn't know Geoffrey particularly well but our paths regularly crossed over the last fifteen years. Actually longer in a sense - he didn't know me back then but I was a fan of his when he appeared on spoof TV channel comedy KYTV in the late eighties with Angus Deayton. At the BBC and with independent production companies Tiger Aspect and Hat Trick he went on to become one of the biggest backroom movers and shakers in comedy, being involved with seemingly everyone from Harry Enfield to Father Ted, Ben Elton to Caroline Aherne.

What was most impressive about Perkins was the fact that he was clearly a true comedy fan. While other comedy bosses often become out of touch when they get big jobs – I recently met one who had never seen the brilliant Michael McIntyre – Perkins clearly had his finger on the pulse. I remember seeing him in the audience of Catherine Tate's early live sketch show at the Soho Theatre and, true enough, Perkins was behind Tate when she became one of the BBC's biggest stars a few years later.

He was a hands-on boss who knew when to be hands-off too. Eight years ago I was writing a feature on The Fast Show and went to visit them on location near Darlington. Perkins turned up to see how things were going but he was so quiet and unassuming one hardly noticed him. You can be sure, however, that had their production run into problems he would have been the first to step in and steady the ship.

As I have previously written, it has been a bad time for good wits lately, with Miles Kington and Alan Coren and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue quizmaster Humphrey Lyttelton passing away in quick succession. In Perkins another ISIHAC link is gone. He was reputed to have invented the show's absurdist – or should that be absurdest? – game, Mornington Crescent. Just another string to a man who had more bows that the British Olympic archery team.