It’s coming up to party season. Any day now the annual test of hepatic fortitude will begin. Buoyed up with warm white wine or cold mulled wine, we’ll be expected to make polite conversation with new people, any one of whom could at any moment reveal themselves to be a vaccine denier, a recently ennobled member of the Brexit Party, or the wrong Goss twin. For satirists and comedians this means we’ll also get many times our annual recommended dose of “You must be loving this! This lot must be giving you loads of material!”

We are not loving it. For the record, making fun of politicians is not the most difficult job in the word. In fact, it’s nowhere near as difficult as Matt Forde makes it look. At its most basic, it’s simply invective algebra. Here’s one popular formula:

[Word for unkempt (rumpled, windblown, bedraggled)] + [word for cartoon bear (Bungle, Chewbacca, Honey Monster)] = [Acceptable “funny” term for Boris Johnson]. “He shambled in like a badly-thatched Baloo.” See? If you run out of cartoon bears, you can always substitute words for inflatables: water-damaged space hopper, a bouncy castle dragged from the bottom of a pond, last year’s yoga ball.

If you’d like to play along, try this one and see how you get on: Jacob Rees-Mogg = historical term + cylindrical object (“fossilised snooker cue”, “mummified giraffe”, or “inflatable tube man found guarding a crypt”).

This only really fails when you get the basic characterisation wrong. John Crace spent years trying to convince everyone that Theresa May was like a robot when it was very clear she wasn’t. Theresa May was like a noodle-armed, substitute ghoul from the Despair Regions. Her dancing was that of a self-conscious scarecrow at an open audition for We Will Rock You.

I’m glad I don’t have to spend months thinking up ephemeral lettuce puns that someone would already have thought up on Twitter. It seemed like a lost cos

Political comedy, of course, has a very short shelf life. We look with envy at our contemporaries who went into observational comedy and can still wheel out that 2007 sketch about why there are raisins in Bombay mix. In 2016 I had to write a bit about the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate, who was someone I’m willing to bet no one reading this column will be able to name any more*. They were Hilary Clinton’s running mate two elections ago, a candidate for the second-most-powerful role in the world, and now they have family members who will need reminding that it ever happened.

I’ve got eight full minutes on Phillip Hammond. I can name all of the candidates in the 2015 Labour leadership election and do one-liners on each (MEMO TO SELF: Repurpose the old Liz Kendall bits to fit Rachel Reeves. Guarantee no one will notice.) I wrote an epic poem about Eric Pickles. I did a song about T-PIMs (“they are – of course – named after two of George Osborne’s three favourite drinks: tea and Pimms. The other being the blood of orphans.”).

All gone. “It’s Not Easy Being Brown”, “Dear Students”, and “That’s Why They Call Us The Blues”, were all packed with references that seemed vitally important at the time, but that no one can remember now. Topical comedy is as dust. What even is a David Laws?

It’s fitting, then, that Liz Truss should be gone almost before she arrived, flying in through one window of Westminster Hall before smashing straight into the one on the other side. Then flapping and flailing as she persistently hurled herself at the still-closed window, until gently removed by a kindly Sergeant-at-Arms and kept in a box until she can be quietly destroyed. Frankly, I’m glad I don’t have to spend months thinking up ephemeral lettuce puns that someone would already have thought up on Twitter. It seemed like a lost cos.

No, it feels like it’s time to go into observational comedy. To corner the market in wry witticisms about everyday life, and a sideways look at the world of parenthood. To that end, I decided I’d go out, I’d experience life, I’d breathe in the world – the real world – rather than stewing in the second-hand digital gossip of the world of politics.

I took one last look at my phone. Rishi Sunak had just been confirmed leader of the Conservative party, saying he was aiming to fix “a profound economic crisis”. If only he could find the person who had been Chancellor for the last few years, he’d give them a really stern talking to. I decided I’d walk the dog and drink in life and stop trying to think up an extended scatological metaphor for the current state of the Conservative party.

So, I put on my best observational glasses and went out to experience life on the mean streets of Dorking on a Sunday morning. What truths about human nature could I glean from the old man who gave me a hostile glare as I passed his bench? What relatable, snackable content chunk could I wheedle from the fact that it clouded over quite quickly and I had come out without a jacket?

In all honesty, I’m not sure I’m cut out for the observational comedy game. As I wandered, wide-eyed, eager for life’s little quirks to jump out at me, I failed to notice my dog happily devouring a pile of fox poo. A few steps later, he puked the poo up again, and refused to move until I’d let him gobble the entire mess again. Repeatedly. This happened seven times in the course of a short walk.

No, I thought as I stood next to my shameless hound, scarfing down his fourth portion of re-vomited faecal matter, maybe I’m not great at observational comedy. On the bright side, however, I may just have found my metaphor for the Tory party…

*Senator Tim Kaine. Rose without trace.

Nathaniel Tapley is a comedy writer and performer on the TV shows you hate