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 we interview have made the same move, or are about to. Some went from clubs to theatres. Some went the other way. We asked them what changes, what gets harder, and why they bothered. Read our interview with Krystyna Hutchinson and Corinne Fisher.
Jump to: What is the difference? · Why they move · What gets harder · The director · Alone, but not really · Which is harder? · Six rules · Common questions
What is the difference between a stand-up set and a solo show?
A club set is built from jokes that can be moved around. Cut one and the rest still works. A solo show is usually one story with a beginning and an end, and often has lights, sound, music or characters. Take a piece out and something later stops making sense.
CeeKay Brown, who is turning her touring show into a Fringe hour, says the two countries she works in want different things. American rooms expect joke after joke. British hours lean towards storytelling. What she is aiming for is an hour that tells a story and still has the rhythm of a club set. Read our interview with CeeKay Brown.
Plenty of comedians stay close to the club. Tori Morancay calls her debut “a stand-up one-woman show. Mostly stand-up.” It is three years of material, put in a new order so that it tells her life. Read our interview with Tori Morancay.
Irene Woo was firm about it. She wrote jokes in sections, wrote far more than she needed, and only then arranged the best of them around one event that the show keeps returning to. “I wanted this to be stand-up first.” Read our interview with Irene Woo. The device she is describing is the callback.
Why comedians move to theatre
Stand-up could not hold all of them
Aarushi Agni did stand-up for eleven years without making a special. She never felt there was enough behind the material, a judgment she now calls “really unkind to my work, because it is good standup and I’m a great performer.” The real reason was different. Part of her was not on stage. She sings and writes poems, and her solo hour puts all of that in the same room. Read our interview with Aarushi Agni.
Liz Coin’s show contains stand-up, improv, musical theatre, clown, dance, crowd work and a magic trick. By her own count that is every kind of performance except juggling. Read our interview with Liz Coin.
The subject needed more than five minutes
Hutchinson’s show is about growing up with parents who bullied her, and it ends with the worst night of her life. Stacy Price’s is about her own cancer. Tom Nemec has done stand-up for about thirty-five years and spent much of that time feeding pieces of his childhood into club sets, where people kept asking afterwards whether any of it was real. His first one-man play tells the whole story. The actor Mark Ryder wrote his about the pressure on men to seem strong.
None of these fit between two other comics on a Tuesday. Ryder chose comedy anyway, because he thinks laughter opens people up. An audience that is laughing is on the character’s side, so when the tone turns they are still listening. He wants people “to come out a little bit softer, a little bit more open”. Read our interview with Mark Ryder.
They would sooner play someone else
Lucy Boisvert moved to New York at eighteen to do stand-up and found it lonely. She went into sketch and plays and stayed there. “I like playing a character that’s not me.” She also has a rule for anyone holding a stage for an hour: “It’s no fun to watch somebody act for an hour, but it’s tons of fun to watch characters for an hour.” Read our interview with Lucy Boisvert.
Stacy Price says she cannot simply be herself with a microphone. Give her a character and she can improvise freely. She plays about five people in her show, including the patient, and that one was the problem. “The character that is essentially myself in my show, the one closest to me — that’s the one that required the most work.” Read our interview with Stacy Price.
What gets harder
Remembering it
Stand-up came easily to Stacie Burrows from the first night. “The first time I did standup, I was like, yep, I was born for this.” Her first fully staged solo show did not. It was twenty-six pages of monologue that had to stay in exact order, because every cue hung off the words. Learning it nearly beat her. A later show took five years to finish. Read our interview with Stacie Burrows.
Doing the hard part every day
On the second day of her Edinburgh run, Hutchinson realised that she had to act out the worst night of her life every day for a month. “I didn’t think ahead on this.” She expected it to wear her down. It did the opposite, and she calls the month “an extreme catharsis”. She sold more than 700 tickets across thirty shows.
Winnie Stack reads her real childhood journals on stage. “It feels extremely freeing and cathartic — and scary, all wrapped up into one.” Read our interview with Winnie Stack.
The empty seats
A club comic shares the room with the rest of the bill. A solo performer owns every seat. Marina di Marzo once played her hour to an audience of one. She spent the first minutes working out how, and came off having decided it was fine. Read our interview with Marina di Marzo.
Brendon Lemon took his first solo hour to Edinburgh in 2017. The show went down reasonably well. The festival flattened him: cold, wet, endless flyering, and audiences who did not recognise his references. Read our interview with Brendon Lemon. Coin says almost all of her budget went on marketing, flights and housing. A month at the Fringe is simply expensive.
The director: someone to tell you no
Club comics rarely have a director. The audience does that job, one night at a time. In theatre it is normal, and almost everyone we spoke to had one. As Brown puts it, directors are common for Fringe debuts and rare for club sets. She is hiring one.
Mark Ryder handed his script to the Portuguese director Rute Costa, sure that it was finished.
“I had a draft and I thought, this is it. And she was like, it’s going to change so much. And I was like, nah, this is a masterpiece.”
Mark Ryder
It changed enormously. His conclusion is that a good actor with a good director is better than a good actor alone, because left to yourself you fall back on habits.
Tom Nemec set his terms on the first day with his director, Jim Mendrinos. “I don’t want anybody to tell me what to do, and I don’t want anybody to write anything for me.” Mendrinos agreed it was Nemec’s show and said he was there to guide it. The note he gave most often was that a piece worked but did not move the story forward. Nemec admits he was usually right. Read our interview with Tom Nemec.
Burrows works every line with her director and dramaturge. The test is that each word has to drive the story. Corinne Fisher wrote and performed a one-woman show at 24, and gives her director the credit for turning a good show into a great one. Read our interview with Corinne Fisher.
Fletcher Michael learned a different lesson from watching his plays on their feet. A script that reads quickly can slow to a crawl once actors have to cross a stage. And a joke that is funny on the page can get nothing if the setup and the punchline are too far apart. “You need to make sure that your setup is as good as your punchline.” Read our interview with Fletcher Michael.
Alone, but not really
The odd thing about solo shows is how few of them are solo.
Ryder says the audience becomes the other actor. “You’re just doing the dance with the audience. They kind of become the other character.”
Sevrin Willinder is alone on stage for an hour and calls that description misleading. His collaborator Melissa built the show with him and runs the tech live, which makes her a scene partner the audience cannot see. “I don’t trust anyone else to tech it.” Read our interview with Sevrin Willinder.
Rebecca Wolf hands a pink telephone to the audience and turns them into her neighbours. “It’s a solo show, but it’s rarely just me.” Read our interview with Rebecca Wolf. For people who chose not to work alone at all, see comedy duos, couples and ensembles.
Coin’s show began with the question itself. She had just watched someone else’s solo show and asked why she was doing all of this by herself. That question became the hour.
Which is harder?
We have had every possible answer.
Stand-up is harder, says Rebecca Wolf, who also does improv and clown. In improv you have a team. In a solo show she is a character called Peg. “When I’m doing stand-up it’s so personal. I’m talking about things that really happened to me. And when it’s not funny, it’s really humiliating to be bad at it.”
The solo show is harder, says Stacie Burrows, for whom stand-up was easy from the first night and a staged script was not.
Yourself is the hardest part either way, say Stacy Price and Lucy Boisvert, which is why both prefer a costume.
It is easier if you do not know better, says Corinne Fisher. She made her one-woman show before she had started stand-up. “The best time to take on something difficult is before you know how difficult it’s going to be.” She compares it to learning to ski as a child, when you are not yet thinking about what could go wrong.
Six rules for a comedian writing a solo show
- Decide which comes first, the jokes or the story. Woo wrote the jokes and found the story afterwards. Hutchinson started with the story. Both work. Not deciding does not.
- Get a director, and let them change it. Ryder, Nemec, Burrows, Woo and Fisher all had one. The most useful note is the one Nemec kept getting: this is good, and it does not move things forward.
- Give every section a job. In a club a joke only has to be funny. In an hour it also has to lead somewhere.
- Plan for doing it thirty times. Hutchinson did not think about repeating her hardest scene daily until day two.
- Give yourself a rest inside the show. Meg Millane puts dance breaks in hers, because a minute and a half without speaking is a gift to a performer. “Honestly, I think more shows need dance breaks.” Read our interview with Meg Millane.
- Start before you are ready. Fisher’s rule. You will not feel qualified, and that helps.
For the writing itself, see how 25 comedians write their jokes. For the material these shows are usually made of, see how comedians turned their worst moments into comedy and where comedians draw the line on dark jokes.
Common questions about solo shows and stand-up
What is the difference between a solo show and stand-up?
Stand-up is a run of jokes delivered as yourself, and the jokes can usually be reordered. A solo show is one performer telling a single story, often with characters, music or staging, in a fixed order. Many shows sit between the two.
Why do stand-up comedians do the Edinburgh Fringe?
It is the place to perform a full hour every day for a month. Comedians told us they went to find out whether they had an hour in them, to tell a story too long for a club, and to reach an audience outside their own country.
Do solo shows need a director?
They do not need one, but nearly every performer we interviewed used one. A director sees the show from the seats, which the performer never can.
How long is a solo show?
Most Fringe shows run about an hour. A club set for a new comedian is five to ten minutes, and a headliner does forty-five minutes to an hour.
For more conversations like these, see all our comedian interviews.