Apparently we must all tighten our belts. That’s easy for David Cameron to say, cycling everywhere and being all trim and fit. I’ve put on two stone in the last three years of constant touring. But it’s not only my waistline that, apparently, needs squeezing.

Reading between the lines of The Big Society manifesto, Dave is encouraging charitable organisations to take on many of the social services currently provided by government, and go-getting individuals, like the journalist and thinker Toby Young, are even being invited to set up their own schools. There may be some logic in encouraging us to take responsibility for ourselves and pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and Dave himself is a good example of someone who has made it right to the very top of society on his own initiative, despite a difficult start in life. But the problem with expecting charitable organizations, philanthropists and religious groups to pick up the slack is they often have their own agendas. I remember an eggy local London news moment where a black evangelical church coalition, encouraged by the mayor to help tackle gun crime, cited homosexuality as one of the phenomena’s causes, and which needed to be stamped out. Those gays! Shooting everyone up. With their guns.

Obviously, compared to the Uzi-fuelled turf war currently raging outside my Hackney window, the future of The Arts in The Big Society is not terribly important. But as arts budgets get slashed it seems we artists (and I use the word loosely, as I am a stand-up comedian) will have to get used to making faustian pacts with private donors and big corporations. This is not as simple as it seems. An arts charity of which I am a patron (have I mentioned that I do a lot of behind the scenes, secret work for charity?) recently asked me if I’d meet someone from a big supermarket, famous for its support of The Arts, about funding. But when the writs hit the fan over Jerry Springer The Opera, a multi-award winning live piece I co-wrote the words for at the National Theatre, the same supermarket was one of the stores that withdrew DVDs and CDs of the show from its shelves. Far right religious groups has threatened a boycott. (As a result, I always make a point of shoplifting one small item whenever I visit the store.) Where would this big backer be if the going got tough? At its best, art can be a slippery thing, its meaning often opaque, its exact intent sometimes unclear. It’s not necessarily compatible with shifting more baked beans, even the low fat, low salt ones we all must now eat.

Artists themselves of course are notoriously sensitive creatures and may feel compromised by the sponsorship they might need to survive, depending on the nature of the company. At the Tate’s Summer opening, protestors celebrated the gallery’s twenty year relationship with BP by sloshing crude oil around, while philosophical arts grandees politely applauded their right to do so and munched their globally warmed canapés. In the fallout, Grayson Perry, whom I once gushed at in a motorway service station like a smitten fan, said that corporate funding for the arts was vital. Christopher Frayling, the former arts council chair, pointed out that the Florentine Renaissance was funded by unscrupulous bankers. But Mark Ravenhill, the former enfant terrible and current homme terrible of British theatre, proposes a Big Society type audit solution to Arts Institutions’ Corporate development departments, and slash them if it can’t be proven that the money they raise outweighs their running costs, and suggests that corporate arts culture means artists hear more feedback from banker’s spouses than from culture consumers.

In my own little corner of the Arts, stand-up comedy, we currently have our own teacup tempest version of this debate. For the past thirty years at the Edinburgh fringe there has been an annual award for comedy, its rules of eligibility ever shifting, its exact criteria mutable and misty, and until 2007 the sponsor was the initially innocuous water company Perrier. But in 1995, Perrier was bought by Nestle whom, the World Health Organisation maintained, could reduce developing world infant mortality by 1.5 million per year if they stopped selling powdered baby milk to areas where the water supply was unsuitable. Previous Perrier winners, including Emma Thompson and Steve Coogan registered their disapproval but the awards’ organizer, Nica Burns, told me protest was inappropriate, and that there was the other 48 weeks of the year for discussing politics.

This year, Foster’s lager has taken on the poisoned chalice sponsoring the difficult fit of fringe comedy and corporate awards. Foster’s recently became the sponsor of all ‘Channel 4 Comedy’, a bold move given its notoriously low quality. Last month the beer’s logo appeared before a Jack Whitehall routine in which the young comic questioned the point of paying for the surroundsound experience of the South African world cup, which makes it feel like you are there, as presumably it would just mean you got AIDS and had your TV nicked. Technically, it’s a neat enough joke. But I used to like Foster’s. And now it makes me think of babies with AIDS.

In an attempt to link the Edinburgh Fringe Comedy awards with the Foster’s brand, the organizers have invited the public to vote on-line for a Comedy God, drawn from nearly three hundred individual past award nominees, some explicitly named, some under the names of the shows they won with, the majority of whom there is no video evidence of for the conscientious voter who didn’t perhaps attend the last 30 Edinburgh Fringes to check, and none of whom presumably were asked if they minded their names being used to drive traffic to a Foster’s site. We love being exploited, us artists.

It’s just a bit of Summer fun, said the organizers in their defence, after I sent them a furious and rude 12.30 a.m. e-mail in a fit of rage. But it isn’t. The way public polls work, whoever is currently the best known comic in Britain with internet users, probably Michael MacIntyre or Russell Howard, will win the spurious poll, and the new sponsor will be happy to have their profile raised by association, at the expense of hundreds of other artists, none of whom agreed to be part of a Foster’s marketing exercise. I suggested that Frank Chickens, a Japanese performance art duo nominated for the Perrier in 1984, when the awards were a rather less commercial proposition, might arguably be the best act on the list, but would not get any votes because the public hadn’t heard of them. Typically, in the age of Twitter, Frank Chickens are now leading the field to be Foster’s Comedy Gods, and it’s not impossible, come August 25th that, somehow, corporate money might be used to highlight Kazuko Hoki’s three decade career of idiosyncratic multi-media live-art, rather than cementing the easy fit with an already wealthy and famous chat show friendly stand-up that Foster’s might have preferred. If arts funding is to reduce, and the corporate money is out there, the question is, can we find some way to use it for our own ends.