Liz Coin raised fourteen thousand dollars to bring her show from New York to the 2026 Edinburgh Fringe. In the show she plays a woman who believes she is on Broadway with an enormous budget. What the audience actually sees looks more like a teenager in a church basement, and that is on purpose. Almost none of the money went on…
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 LemonMany of the…
About a year into stand-up, Chloe Matonis did a strong seven minutes on someone else’s show. A promoter in the audience offered her a thirty-minute slot at his weekly night, and she said yes at once. The room was full. It was a good night for everybody else. She bombed for the whole half hour, and she was wearing a watch…
Irene Woo was a software engineer at Google before she was a comedian. A friend calls her act “Type A comedy”: precise, planned and led by the writing. So she took improv classes, for exactly the reason you would expect.“I’m naturally an overthinker, so improv is really helpful, because you…
Solo Show or Stand-Up Set? Why Comedians Move to Theatre
October 8, 2026
Krystyna Hutchinson has been a stand-up for most of her adult life. She describes the job simply: setup, punchline, setup, punchline. In 2026 she took her first solo show to the Edinburgh Fringe for a month, and came back with a short verdict. A solo show, she says, “is a different animal”.A lot of the comedians…
First Laughs: How 28 Comedians Remember the First One
October 8, 2026
We ask almost every comedian the same question: do you remember your first laugh? Seann Walsh gave the shortest answer we have ever had. Asked what it felt like, he used two words.“Strong drugs.”
Seann WalshOthers needed longer. Some remember the room, the line and the character they were playing. Some…
Social Media vs the Stage: What Comedians Really Think
October 8, 2026
Liz Coin was once given a piece of advice about social media that she has never forgotten. A carefully written, well-edited video of hers might get two hundred views. Something filmed in a bathroom might get two million. The advice explained why that was fine.“Social media people are there to eat potato chips, and…
Where's the Line? Comedians on Dark Jokes and Going Too Far
October 8, 2026
In 2025 a Brazilian comedian was sentenced to more than eight years in prison for jokes in a stand-up special. The conviction was overturned the following year. Most comedians will never face a court, but nearly all of them face a smaller version of the same question every night: is this joke worth telling here, to these…
For more than a decade, SiriusXM’s Raw Dog Comedy was the satellite radio channel for working comedians: the people filling clubs on a Tuesday night, not the ones selling out arenas. In April 2026 it was replaced by Sebastian Maniscalco’s Comedy Radio. Six months later, a long list of comedians is publicly asking for…
Overlooked, Rejected, Still Here: How Comedians Keep Going
October 6, 2026
The manager Barry Katz gave us two careers to compare. One comedian, he said, got her break four months after she started. Another did stand-up for forty-two years, living in a studio apartment, before he was asked to headline. “Comedy isn’t fair,” Katz said. He has watched it for four decades and does not…