Job cuts, strikes, foreclosures — it’s going to be a challenge for this year’s crop of Edinburgh Fringe comedians to wring some laughs out of the credit crunch. Even less funny is that earlier this year, Intelligent Finance announced that it was ending its sponsorship deal with the festival awards.

Fortunately the theatre impresario Nica Burns, who since 1984 has produced the awards (formerly the Perrier awards, briefly the unwieldy if.comedies, now — and for ever, if Burns has her way — the Edinburgh Comedy Awards), has stepped into the breach and stumped up her own cash — quite a lot of it.

“My No 2 tried to talk me out of it,” she admits. “He was looking at the money in the bank account and thought he’d rather like it to stay there.”

So how deeply into her pockets has Burns dug? “A good six figures deep!” she says. “It’s a lot of money to do it properly, and that’s with cuts. They’ve always cost a lot more to do. I’m hoping I’ll be able to keep it under £150,000.”

Burns is adamant that the awards are worth saving (though she admits that she can’t fund them for more than one year — next year is their 30th anniversary, and she calls it “unthinkable” that they won’t find a keen sponsor). The industry may now be more commercialised, but she believes the awards are an important part of that. “The industry is very structured now and there’s a real understanding about career progression for a comedian,” she says. “You start off doing little guest spots in the clubs, unpaid, five minutes, then you graduate to going on the bill and getting paid, then to headliner, and then it’s time to go: ‘Right, I have to go beyond my 20 minutes now, I’ve got to do my hour.’

“So that becomes the goal, and a part of that is: ‘I want it to be good enough to get a nomination,’ ” she argues. “The nominations are very important to [comedians], it’s really something that they work towards.”

It’s a question of opening doors, she believes. “The nominees for the comedy awards set the standard for comedy for that year. I think that all my winners would have got there in the end, but getting a nomination gets them there quicker.”