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No one ever built a statue to a critic, they say – but plenty of art gets made about them. There was Wild Bore at the Traverse a few Edinburgh fringes back, an eye-catching performance-art attack on the notion of critical authority. There was Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound, Sheridan’s The Critic, and the 70s horror movie (later a play) Theatre of Blood, in which critics are subjected to gruesome murder at the hands of a deranged thesp. And while we’re talking unspeakable gore, one feature of Sarah Kane’s queasy play Cleansed, currently enjoying a revival, is that (in a wanton act of literary vengeance) its sadistic torturer antagonist is named after a theatre critic, Jack Tinker, who’d panned Kane’s work.

Runts of the reviewing litter though we are, there’s even a sub-genre of art about comedy critics. The comic Russell Kane wrote a novel about one who was unable to laugh. Ex-critic Charlotte Runcie wrote another about a journo giving a woman a one-star review for her standup, then sleeping with her.

So there’s a precedent for the two shows on this year’s fringe that take comedy reviewing as their subject, one of them in direct response to so-so notices at last year’s festival. That show is Andrew Doherty’s Reviewers Welcome … to Die! It’s a folk-horror spoof about an up-himself critic obliged by demons to learn the error of his ways. It springs from Doherty’s dismay at receiving a three-star crit (“one of the three worst scores you can get!”) for his sophomore show Sad Gay Aids Play – after critical hosannahs greeted his debut the year before.

So where does Reviewers Welcome fall on the all-important five-star spectrum? Happily, given that this is not a review, I am under no obligation to rate his show, which characterises those in my profession as preening, nepotistic snobs, scorning the talent they purport to judge while nursing their own thwarted artistic delusions. “How sad, lonely and pathetic I am,” trills Doherty’s anti-hero Felix Chatelier, at least until popular and sexy playwriting genius “Andrew Doherty” shows up to shepherd our unlovely critic towards redemption. This happens at a fringe festival in the fictional Midlands town of Billington, a name that long-time readers of Guardian theatre reviews may recognise.

All of this unfolds in the spoof scary-movie style familiar from Doherty’s hit Gay Witch Sex Cult, another Wicker Man-ish affair pitting a dopey outsider against yokel locals and dark forces beyond everyone’s ken. Just as it trades in genre stereotype, so the show’s take on critics seldom outpaces cliche – although I did enjoy the closing gag about Chatelier’s constitutional inability to dole out that final, fifth star. But we critics get off lightly here, in that Reviewers Welcome is as much a mickey-take of thin-skinned artists bearing grudges as of those arbiters of taste who decorate or dismiss them with a swish of our pen.

And now to the second show. When Adam Riches bounds on stage in character as eminent comedy critic Caliban Monroe, it looks like his show The Critic’s Way might land uncomfortably closer to the bone. Scottish accent? Replica Scottish football sportswear? Why do I feel like I’ve seen this (stylish, smooth-talking) guy before? But The Critic’s Way soon devolves into another of Riches’ familiar burlesques on swaggering but shallow masculinity (ah, so it can’t be me then) with strictly limited insight into Caliban’s critical calling. The persona makes Chatelier look multidimensional by comparison, as Riches loudly deplores comedians, claims to have invented star ratings and reads from his now-remaindered titular treatise on the art of what he calls “the ’tique”.

There’s little of the promised “razor-sharp satire”, although – like most of Riches’ uproarious interactive work – his show is never less than a hoot. “Who wants to be a comedy critic?” he barks, eyeballing the audience as I shrink in my seat. Inevitably, behind the arrogant veneer, Monroe is another “sad, lonely and pathetic” individual. The “voice of a veneration” no longer, he’s out of a job after a victim of his hatchet work hits back against one particularly indelicate review. You could just about read this as an exploration of a changing climate for criticism, in which speech is neurotically policed, and ideas like objective judgment and the single authoritative voice are both critically (as it were) out of fashion.

Or you could enjoy Riches’ exuberant faux-workshop for what it is: a 50-minute piece of nonsense revelling in the archetype of the cultural snob, in love with his own supposed erudition, seething with resentment that to deploy it he must piggyback on the work of – shudder! – mere comedians.

Considering these two shows together as a critique of the service we comedy reviewers render – well, there’s ridicule (fair enough) but perhaps grudging affection too. It’s probably a three-star review then for me and my counterparts – but I like to think it reads like a four.

• Andrew Doherty’s Reviewers Welcome … to Die! is Upstairs at Pleasant Courtyard, Edinburgh, until 30 August; Adam Riches’ The Critic’s Way is at Cow Cafe at Underbelly, Cowgate, Edinburgh, until 30 August