This past week, people in Edinburgh paid £31 to see the television comedian Michael McIntyre’s warm-up shows of work-in-progress for his forthcoming stadium tour. Personally I never do warm-up shows for my own standup. My grandfather was of the opinion that you couldn’t polish a turd. He did, however, believe very strongly in lacquering them, and lost many friends after insisting they sat through a piece-by-piece display of his entire collection.

Critics complain that £31 is too much for Michael McIntyre‘s try-out show, competing, by virtue of its appearance in Edinburgh this month, with free fringe performances by unknown talents. But Michael McIntyre’s £31 warm-ups were not part of the Edinburgh fringe and so he was not obliged to observe its ethics. The high prices do mean, however, that McIntyre could afford to pay significantly more than the £200 he recently offered a Yorkshire security guard if he’d beat up an inflatable sex doll wearing a mask of my face.

My tickets in Edinburgh are £15, but I do not think it is wrong for Michael McIntyre to charge twice that, or for his colleague the television comedian Frankie Boyle to charge £29 in the same venue. Television comedians guarantee a good night out to cash-rich fun-seekers, and so are priced accordingly. My tragedy is that, irrespective of any merits I may or may not have, I am valued only by people unlikely to pay higher ticket prices. This depressing fact was brought home to me by the television potter Grayson Perry, when I cornered him at a motorway service station coffee franchise at 3am earlier this year, a spur-of-the-moment decision I was to regret.

I am a long-term fan of Perry’s charming clay efforts, having got into him years ago because he said he liked the Fall, who are the kind of thing I like. I congratulated him on the upsurge in his fortunes, such as his sideways move from squeezing, baking and daubing his filthy and infantile clay urns into broadcasting on the prestigious Channel 4 network. Perry declared himself, his female alter ego Claire, and his teddy bear Alan Measles, as followers of my own work, and said they had all attended my recent London standup run. “We only had one seat though, because they all live in my brain, but I did buy three tickets so it was fair,” Perry explained. “I had beer, Claire had wine, and Alan had fizzy pop, but it all got mixed up in my tummy and I was sick on the bus home. Luckily I had one of my pots to catch it in.”

Upon spotting Perry at the service station that night, I had merely wanted to praise him, get a hot chocolate, and go. But soon the cross-dressing potter had begun waving his arms about, television artist style, and volunteering all sorts of unsolicited opinions about my work. He said the way what I did was consumed was directly relevant to aspects of social class in Britain that he and his other personalities were exploring on their Channel 4 show. “Claire and Alan and I went to a new-build estate in Tunbridge Wells for our TV series,” he explained, “and the middle classes there cemented their self-esteem by buying expensive cupcakes and designer cookware, and chucking balsamic vinegar at their Jamie Oliver dinners.” “Ha, ha, yes. Wankers,” I said, fingering my cup, wondering if that was what the clay wrangler wanted me to say. Who was talking to me anyway? Grayson Perry? Claire? The teddy bear, Alan Measles?

The mouth on Perry’s face continued opening and closing: “But there’s a different kind of middle class too. They reject conspicuous consumption. They’re financially squeezed intellectuals and working-class refugees, perhaps given ideas above their station way back when they could afford further education. Their homes are littered with secondhand vintage Penguin paperbacks, faded prints by acclaimed artists on the edge of public consciousness, and ironic knick-knacks from the 1930s, 50s or 70s. They can’t and won’t spend the Jamie Oliver types’ kind of money, so these inexpensive items are loaded with what Alan Measles calls cultural capital, and you can only really tell what they’re worth after a complex process of social and intellectual triangulation. And that’s you, see, Stewart Lee. Alan Measles says you are that paperback. You are that old print. Alan Measles says you are the same as a 1950s ceramic bloodhound-shaped spirits bottle that plays Roll Out the Barrel when you lift it off the shelf. Me, Claire and Alan Measles, we all despise your work. But we are fascinated by what you represent. Cultural capital.”

And so if you’re someone who comes to see me live, Alan Measles and I know who you are. You’re the Guardian-reading parents of the clever friends I had as a teenager and I’m still trying to get your approval so you’ll let the teenage me go out with your daughters or take me with you to the RSC studio to see Trevor Griffiths plays on £5 stand-bys. That’s why my tickets are cheaper than McIntyre’s. Because you know what you like and you consume culture frequently and often, but at necessarily lower prices, because you flatter yourselves that you have taste and the best stuff isn’t usually the most expensive. That’s why I can’t charge you higher rates. You did me over as a kid and you’re doing me over again.

Not for me crowds of estate agents, golf club managers, poodle parlour owners, Volkswagen dealership staff, wedding planners, cake decorators, GMTV presenters, and Strictly Come Dancing judges. Three-big-nights-out-a-year types. Status spenders. Yet still they come, my “fans”, in sustainable numbers, but at reduced rates, so I’ll never get my swimming pool. They keep coming, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that my act’s objective value is difficult to discern. Are they involved in some ironic feedback loop? Do they come precisely because they think I am terrible? After two days of thinking about what Alan Measles told Grayson Perry, I lay next to my wife in bed at night, awake. The room seemed foreign, the children unfamiliar. I stood in the bathroom naked and counted all the mini hotel toiletries that I have purloined when on tour. There are hundreds of them now, thousands even. I need never buy shampoo again as long as I live. They can’t take that away from me.

Stewart Lee’s Carpet Remnant World is at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, until 26 August