Brendon Lemon is from Detroit. His grandmother is from Edinburgh, and he has now been to the Fringe there five times. After the first one, in 2017, he came home with a theory about the two countries.
“The British don’t laugh at everything. Americans laugh at almost anything.”
Brendon Lemon
Many of the comedians we interview work on both sides of the Atlantic, and plenty of them had just come off a month in Edinburgh when we spoke. These are their opinions, and they are generalisations. But they agree with each other more often than you would expect. Read our interview with Brendon Lemon.
Jump to: The joke or the angle · Winner or loser · Shy or unshockable · Story or joke rate · Lost references · Canada and elsewhere · What stays the same · Five rules · Common questions
The British want the joke. Americans want the angle.
Lemon’s view is that American audiences reward an interesting point of view. British audiences want the joke itself: the wordplay, the pun, the thing said in a funny way.
For his fifth Fringe he decided to learn the other method, and wrote his show with Adele Cliff, a British joke writer. He would bring her material. She would tell him it was not material yet.
“Yeah — these aren’t really jokes. These aren’t jokes in the way that British people think about jokes.”
Adele Cliff, as Brendon Lemon recalls it
They went back and forth until each one was. He is frank that it is a test. “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.”
He traces the split to where each tradition began. American stand-up grew up in New York jazz clubs in the 1940s and 50s, where somebody had to keep the crowd in their seats between sets. British comedy came through variety theatre and storytelling, and grew up close to public broadcasting. For how the comedians we interview build either kind, see how 25 comedians write their jokes.
The winner and the loser
The sharpest version of the difference, Lemon says, comes from Stephen Fry. In American stand-up the comedian stands above the audience. He has seen something you have not, and he brings it down to show you. In British stand-up the audience is above the comedian. Life keeps landing on him, he stays bad at everything, and that is the joke.
American audiences, Lemon thinks, find the second kind hard to watch. “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.”
British performers we have spoken to describe their own taste in the same terms. Tom Johnson, an actor and sketch comic from Essex, says slick performers do not interest him. “I like people to look like the idiot.” He thinks British television has far too few clowns. Read our interview with Tom Johnson.
Seann Walsh sums up the comedy that drew him in as “adults behaving childishly”. Read our interview with Seann Walsh.
Shy rooms and unshockable ones
Krystyna Hutchinson is a New York club comic. In 2026 she played thirty shows in Edinburgh, and the first thing she noticed was the quiet.
“They’re very shy, UK audiences.”
Krystyna Hutchinson
American crowds, she says, have been trained by years of comedy that chases shock, and very little surprises them. The Edinburgh crowds needed warming up, and then they went with her. Her show includes a very dark scene, and she learned to give it room. “You land the plane gracefully. I have a joke right after. But you’ve got to let it breathe.” Read our interview with Hutchinson and Corinne Fisher.
Irene Woo, who grew up in France and works in New York, said the Fringe taught her the same thing from the other side. A quiet room is the comedian’s problem to solve. “It’s your job to bring the energy up.” She does not mean dominating the room. She means being the highest-energy person in it, at “200 per cent”. Read our interview with Irene Woo.
Wayne Charles II, an American comic, describes the mood he wants in his own Edinburgh show in very British terms. “It’s like hanging out in the pub.” Read our interview with Charles and his two co-stars.
A story or a joke every few seconds
CeeKay Brown is half French and half American and tours in both the United States and Europe. She is turning her club act into a Fringe hour, and describes the task as serving two tastes. American rooms expect joke after joke. British hours lean towards storytelling.
Her model is a show by the Irish comedian Dara Ó Briain that she saw live: one story, packed with punchlines and crowd work. That is what she wants, an hour that tells a story and still has the rhythm of a club set. Read our interview with CeeKay Brown.
Liz Coin sees the American side of that in New York clubs, where purists want the pure form, joke after joke, with nothing in between. Her own act, which borrows from clown, gets her labelled an alternative comic. Read our interview with Liz Coin. For more on the two formats, see solo show or stand-up set.
The references that do not travel
Lemon’s first Edinburgh show went down reasonably well, but audiences did not recognise a single reference in it. That is the plainest problem and the easiest to fix.
Stacy Price brought a show about the cost of being ill in America to Scotland, where treatment is free. She asked an adviser how much she would have to explain. Not much, he said, people would get the idea. She asked what the nearest local equivalent was. He said vet bills. Even those, she noted, came nowhere near the American figures. Read our interview with Stacy Price.
Tori Morancay is French and based in New York, and finds British audiences easier for her material. Americans, she says, know only the clichés about the French. “In the UK we’re so close that a lot of British people have visited France before, so they still have some bad clichés about us, but they know our culture a little bit more.” Read our interview with Tori Morancay.
Some go looking for the friction. Lauren LoGiudice has material about the British being arrogant, and told us she had been waiting to deliver it to British faces.
Canada, and everywhere else
The border between Canada and the United States matters too. Jackie Joy, a Brazilian comic based in Canada, flips her targets depending on which side she is on. The appetite is different as well. “Americans are more for blood.” Canadian rooms are more sensitive to certain jokes, she finds. American ones tell her to go further. Read our interview with Jackie Joy.
Ian Edwards was born in London, raised in Jamaica and built his career in New York and Los Angeles. He hears all of them in his act. “England gave me that dry sense of British humor, Jamaica made my humor more direct, New York made me bold, and LA made me calm down.” Read our interview with Ian Edwards.
John Achkar performs mainly in Arabic and is writing more in English. His rule covers every border. You have to show where you are coming from and still make it understandable to a different audience. “And you cannot just translate.” Read our interview with John Achkar. We have a full piece on comedy in translation.
What stays the same
On one thing nobody disagreed. The audience decides, wherever it is sitting. Lemon says holding the microphone gives a comedian no power at all. Comedy only exists if somebody laughs, so the room is the judge. “If you’re not getting laughs, it’s slam poetry. You’re not doing comedy.”
Tom Johnson describes what a laughing room feels like, and it is not specific to any country. “It’s like all the barriers have come down, and that’s the one big thing everyone has in common — laughing.”
Five rules for playing the other country
- Change the references first. It is the cheapest fix. Find the local equivalent, as Price did, even if it is only vet bills.
- In Britain, sharpen the wording. Lemon’s lesson from Cliff. An interesting opinion is not yet a joke.
- In America, keep the laughs coming. Brown’s note. A story is welcome if it carries punchlines all the way through.
- Do not read quiet as dislike. Hutchinson’s shy crowds came with her once they were warm. Woo’s answer is to bring the energy yourself.
- Let dark moments breathe. A British room will sit with you in a silence. Have the joke ready for when you land.
For rooms that go badly in any country, see how 21 comedians survived bombing on stage. For what clips do to all of this, see social media versus the stage.
Common questions about British and American comedy audiences
Is British humour different from American humour?
The comedians we interviewed think so. The most common description is that British comedy favours wordplay and a comic who loses, and American comedy favours a strong point of view and a comic who wins.
Are British audiences quieter than American ones?
Several American comics told us British crowds start out more reserved and need warming up. They also said those crowds will follow a comedian into darker or slower material once they trust them.
Do American comedians do well at the Edinburgh Fringe?
Many do. Krystyna Hutchinson sold more than 700 tickets on her first visit. The ones who struggled first time said the problem was references the audience did not know, and the cold, wet work of handing out flyers every day.
Do comedians change their act in different countries?
Most change the references and some of the wording. A few, like Jackie Joy, swap who the joke is aimed at. Almost none change what the act is about.
For more conversations like these, see all our comedian interviews.