This may surprise you, but us comedians aren’t of much practical use to the world. There’s very little we can do about NHS waiting lists, youth unemployment or an increasingly hostile North Korea. We can’t stop General Assad being a mass murderer and we’re powerless to make BBC1’s The Voice any more entertaining.

So I’ve been having a think about what it is I can do. And the answer is to write a show that makes you see the world in a better light. The kind of light they have in the changing rooms at Zara that make you look great and then you buy their clothes.

Entitled You’re Awesome!, the show is an attempt to take all of your half-empty glasses, and miraculously make them half full. Look, I’m not Jesus, but I’m getting there. I think we’ve learned from the last few years of economic and social doom and gloom, that it’s easy to talk yourself into a depression. I’m going to talk you out of it.

So this humble hour of observational comedy, which includes a few carefully selected knob gags – I’m no killjoy – will leave you with a song in your heart, a twinkle in your eye and a bloody annoying smile. The show features an extensive list of those wonderful little things in life that make you inwardly happy – dogs leaning out of car windows, finding money in old trousers, discovering that your difficult girlfriend isn’t pregnant.

I love Edinburgh with a passion and spent four blissful years here as a student in the mid 90s, so the Fringe is always a homecoming of sorts. Fringe audiences have committed to giving you an hour of their time, they are highly comedy literate and mostly they are as keen as you are for the show to be great. The flipside is that yours may be the eighteenth show they’ve seen that day, you’re being compared to someone off of Mock The Week and impatient bladders will come into play for any show after about five in the afternoon.

But I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s the greatest cultural event on the planet.

Mark Dolan – You’re Awesome!, Gilded Balloon, 622 6552, until 25 Aug (not 12), 7.45pm, £10 (£8.50). Previews 31 Jul–2 Aug, £5.