Brendon Lemon has been telling jokes for twenty-five years. The last three and a half he has spent learning how to fail at them properly. Born in Detroit, now based in New York, he first took a microphone in 2002. The room was Mark Ridley’s Comedy Castle, the oldest club in America still run by its original owner. He arrived with two years of improv behind him and two uncles who were stand-up comedians. Since then he has worked out of Michigan, Colorado, France and Chicago. In Chicago he once played a hundred and nine consecutive nights of open mics, mostly bombing. He has toured Texas opening for Saturday Night Live’s Chris Kattan, and shared bills with Christopher Titus.
In late 2022 he took a clown class in New York with Ed Malone. In 2024 he studied with Gaulier in Paris. He describes the effect as being shaken out of a performing lethargy. This is his fifth Edinburgh Fringe. It is the first he has deliberately tried to write like a British comedian. His grandmother is from Edinburgh. He has cousins scattered across England and Scotland. He sounds, as he cheerfully volunteers, extremely American.
We caught up with Brendon to talk about jazz clubs and vaudeville. We also covered the hundred and nine nights he would rather forget. And why the audience, not the comedian, holds all the power.
The first laugh, and the long hangover after it
He started at the Comedy Castle in 2002 after a stand-up class taught by the coach Gilda Hauser. At the graduation show he went on first and destroyed. That turned out to be the problem. A room full of everybody’s friends is not a room that tells you the truth. The open mics that followed were, in his words, where comedy goes to die. He has been chasing that first night ever since.
The first real club laugh came off his opening line. The Sixth Sense was recent, and he looked, at the time, a lot like Haley Joel Osment.
Hey — just in case you’re wondering, I don’t see dead people.
It crushed. “I remember standing there in front of the audience thinking, oh my God, I’m in it. I did it. Once you get the first laugh out of the way, you’re in it.”
Two countries, two entirely different jokes
His 2017 debut was a solo hour called Prophet of Doom. It was about how he thought everything was going to get considerably worse. It went down reasonably well, but the Fringe itself flattened him. Cold, wet, endless flyering, and audiences who did not recognise a single reference.
The British don’t laugh at everything. Americans laugh at almost anything.
Americans, he argues, reward an interesting angle. The British want the joke — the wordplay, the pun, the thing said in a funny way. He traces the split back to origins. American stand-up came out of New York jazz clubs in the 1940s and 50s. Someone had to keep the crowd in their seats between sets. That is how you get Lenny Bruce, and eventually Carlin and Pryor. British comedy came up through a vaudeville storytelling tradition. It grew up closer to state broadcasting.
The sharpest version of the difference he credits to Stephen Fry. In American stand-up the comedian sits above the audience. He sees the thing you don’t, and brings it down so you can look at it. In British stand-up the audience sits above the comedian. Life dumps on him from an incredible height. Despite himself, he stays inept at everything. That is the joke.
And American audiences, he says, cannot bear the second one. “We’re so enthusiastic. We have to believe it’s possible. We can’t watch a movie about a guy who says he’s going to overcome his weaknesses and you know from the beginning he won’t. Please let us believe in something.”
Learning the other grammar
Which is what this year’s show is for. He wrote it with Adele Cliff, a BBC joke writer and repeat Joke of the Fringe finalist. The process mostly consisted of him producing material and her declining to call it material.
Yeah — these aren’t really jokes. These aren’t jokes in the way that British people think about jokes.
Then they would go back and forth until it was one. He is frank that the whole thing is an experiment. “It was a real attempt by me to figure out how to do British-style joke writing. We’ll see if audiences feel the same.”
Who actually holds the room
Asked whether holding the microphone confers power, he says the opposite. The illusion is the entire job. Comedy only exists if somebody laughs, which means the audience is the judge. The performance is a comedian persuading a room that he has authority they in fact hold. The moment they sense he needs something from them, it dies. He quotes Colin Quinn’s line that it is the art form with the most justice in it. The ticket, he adds, is a form of consent you have to keep re-earning.
If you’re not getting laughs, it’s slam poetry. You’re not doing comedy.
He does not mean it as an insult to poets. It is simply how he checks whether the mechanism is working.
Clown, and the uses of the flop
Stand-up, he says, lets you hide. You have the act to fall back on, and a mic stand to hold. You can look over everybody’s heads. Clown removes all of it. “In clown you have to connect.” The flop is clown’s word for the moment it collapses. It is frightening precisely because you cannot conceal it. The discipline is in staying inside the feeling until the next idea arrives.
It’s only when you start to hide, or run away, or try to get out of the moment — that’s when they feel abandoned, because you’ve abandoned them.
He learned that in rooms with nowhere to hide, in New York and then Paris. It has changed how he stands on a stand-up stage since.
A hundred and nine nights
He moved to Chicago in 2015 and found the standard far above him. Six months of nightly open mics, nightly bombing. A hundred and nine consecutive nights on stage. The worst was a room on Halsted called Town Hall, all comedians and no civilians. He went five minutes there without a single laugh, in front of his peers.
“That bomb was so bad it shattered something inside of me,” he says. He was twenty-eight, fourteen years in, and seriously wondered whether comedy was for him. What kept him in was a piece of Robin Williams advice he paraphrases. Tell anyone who says they want to be a comedian not to do it. If they listen, it was never theirs to begin with. Lemon’s conclusion was simply to stop listening to anybody.
A family that jokes at funerals
On dark humour he is unrepentant. He traces it to relatives rather than to comedy clubs. At his aunt’s wake he sat with her widower and her daughter. The conversation was going so well that he filled a lull with a line. Aunt Lori, he observed, should really pass away more often. The room fell apart laughing.
In front of the wrong audience they’d say that’s messed up. In front of the right group of people, it’s lightning striking.
The distinction, he suggests, is not about the joke at all. It is about knowing exactly who is in the room.
The people he watches
Jim Carrey first, seen on Letterman as a child and filed permanently under savant. Then Chris Rock. Bigger and Blacker arrived just before Lemon started. He still rates it as the perfect special, partly for how Rock’s voice sounds. Christopher Titus for the storytelling, and for turning genuinely painful material into bits. Norm Macdonald as the North American comic who plays the British way round. He sounds stupid while everyone watching knows better.
On this side: Daniel Sloss, and James Acaster. He studied Acaster heavily while writing this show. He admires him for knowing exactly where his audience is at any second. And Stewart Lee, whom he thinks is under-praised on both sides of the Atlantic.
A lot of comedians get called geniuses when they’re actually absurd and bonkers, and people mistake absurdity for intelligence. Stewart Lee is an actually intelligent guy.
It is a compliment he pays carefully. He rates the thinking behind the act as much as the act itself.
And the other show: no script at all
His second Fringe show, ADHD, is pure crowd work. It is different every day, and capped at around thirty minutes. He does not believe an audience can take more. He has no bank of prepared comebacks, and no intention of building one.
The plan is to assemble the parachute on the way down.
Clown, he says, is what makes it possible. A question about somebody’s job can spin into a rant, then into two characters arguing. From there it can land in a different audience member’s workplace entirely. He may even invite someone up. He knows precisely how that lands here. “I can already feel British people cringing at the concept, because they just want to sit there and have the comedy come at them.” He is doing it anyway.
What makes Lemon worth watching this August is the question he has staked the hour on. It is one he cannot answer himself. Twenty-five years of American instinct, rewritten line by line against a British ear. Then handed over to the only people qualified to rule on it. He knows the audience holds all the power, and has said so plainly. So he has built one show that asks whether he has learned their language. And another with no script at all. Either the parachute opens or it doesn’t. He seems entirely at peace with both.
An American Comedy Show That Quite Possibly Might Be Funny To The British plays Just the Tonic at The Caves. That is Venue 88, 5–30 August 2026, at 21:30. ADHD: A Crowdwork Comedy Show plays Laughing Horse at The City Cafe. That is Venue 85, same dates, at 18:10. Both are Pay What You Can.