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Into the Deep End - Fringe 2026 Debuts

James Macfarlane James Macfarlane
24 Jul 2026

Why is this the year you've decided to take the plunge and debut your hour at Edinburgh?

Have you SEEN my poster?! We're throwing the kitchen sink at this.

Hannah Byczkowski:  I'm old. Well....not old, old but getting there. I'm a complete hypochondriac worried I'll die every day so what better time than now? But the main reason is this is a show I've worked on for a couple of years and I'm insanely proud of it...which means I'm ready. I'm very self critical when it comes to comedy so it's a momentous occasion that I've given myself approval. 

Jonathan Rudge: Redundancy money!... Seriously. To have a show at the Edinburgh Fringe is such an honour and you pay for the privilege. I left my old job working in TV December just passed with some severance money so it's all invested here. I don't like to think this will be my only full run in Edinburgh, but if it is I want to do it right. Have you SEEN my poster?! We're throwing the kitchen sink at this. 

Mario Adrion: After my last special, full of cultural jokes about my life as a German immigrant in the US, I achieved my goal of proving that Germans can be funny. This hour is much more personal and vulnerable. Now I’m ready to show people that Germans can have emotions too.

Leo Hincks: Emotional Cowboy is the amalgamation of the dreams and anxieties of someone in their early-twenties, I didn’t want to out-grow the show so it felt like a now-or-never situation and I’m never going to say never!  

Guy Branum: Los Angeles is in Chaos. The entertainment industry is collapsing, studios are scared of new ideas, and the city is, most of the time, on fire. I’ve had a nice career writing for TV and doing stand-up and panel shows in the US, but at a time when vision is lacking and a few corporations are controlling what entertainment gets made, I realized I need to work on projects I can control, and are a better forum for my voice and comedic sensibility. If I’m not going to be making any money anyway, I should do it for something I care about, right? So I wrote my show, “Be Fruitful”, which asks if there’s any practical purpose to my existence, and spent a lot of time and effort making it as personal and exacting as possible. If I’m going to do a show I really love, I should do it at a place where people take comedy seriously, so I decided to bring it to Edinburgh. Also, I love sex tourism and I’ve heard that Edinburgh gets nasty.

What's the joke or story in the show that scared you the most to put on stage?

Madeleine Brettingham: Absolutely all of it. I’m quite a private person (that’s why I was a behind-the-scenes writer for years) so the idea of going up onstage and sharing intimate thoughts and feelings was quite scary to me. But I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and throw myself on the mercy of the crowd. I think the fear can sometimes be where the edge is and going to places that you think are unique and peculiar to you is where you find the strongest connection with the audience.

Josh Pickar: The idea of doing a show about the death penalty in the first place scared me deeply. It doesn’t exactly scream easy laughs. Figuring out how to talk about something so serious in a way that still feels human and funny felt daunting. On the other hand, nobody else will be doing my material. 

Keeley Hazell: There’s a story in the show about something traumatic that happened to me when I was 22. It was the reason I left England and moved to Los Angeles, and for years I couldn’t bring myself to write about it, let alone say it out loud to a room full of strangers. It’s the core of the show and the thing that terrifies me the most to talk about. Wish me luck. 

What would success for this show look like if reviews, awards and ticket sales didn't exist?

JR: Are you mad? What would be the point then! No, so long as I get to the end of a show and feel I've put on a good performance in myself, that's success. If in front of two people or two hundred people, I'm not vain when it comes to outward looking successes. If I feel it from inside it's real. 

Jamie Wolf: Those things are not success to me, and they never have been. Many people have gotten reviews, awards, and ticket sales that I will never get. Who genuinely cares? So funny.com said this person's funnier than me. What am I gonna do? Write to funny.com like "hey you made a big mistake. I'm actually funnier. Let me explain." So someone sold out their arena tour. Should I tweet at their fans like "Don't go!! They suck and here's a chart that proves it." No. My job is to get onstage each night and deliver the best show I can deliver. That is success.

KH: That I eradicate misogyny from society. That would be the best outcome. Failing that, I’d settle for my parents finally understanding what I do for a living.

LH: Success would be if people turned up, even bigger success would be if those people were really cool. The fringe is filled with some of my comedy heroes so I would love for them to come and see.

JP: I’d want people to leave curious about the death penalty and the criminal legal system. A lot of people have strong opinions about the death penalty already, and it’s easy to think about it as a clean, well-oiled machine that churns out justice. But it’s a system full of people, and people are messy. If the audience leaves the show thinking the system is a lot less clean and a lot more human than they expected, I’ll be thrilled.

What's the best piece of advice you've been given when it comes to comedy?

MA: Truth is everything in comedy. Talking about the things that genuinely affect me will always be more interesting than trying to guess what the audience wants.

GB: It’s not really a piece of advice, just an example. I’ve written for lots of great comedians, actors and hosts, but so many of them, when presented with a joke about something they’ve never heard of, would say “I’ve never heard of that!” and dismiss the joke. When I wrote for Joan Rivers and wrote a joke about something she’d never heard of, she’d keep listening to see if the other writers laughed. If they did, she wanted to know why. She wanted to learn the new idea, the new pop star, the new dumb fad drink. She wanted the power to get that laugh herself. She made me realize that curiosity is a powerful tool, and that irrelevance isn’t inevitable, it’s a choice.

JW: Usama Siddiquee once told me this, and it's the only advice that has ever actually helped me improve at stand up. It is "Go up as much as possible."

MB: Hmm, probably be very careful about taking advice. It’s not that I don’t think advice is useful but I think what’s so endlessly fascinating about comedy is its slippery nature and its resistance to rules. Sometimes things just work and sometimes they don’t and one person’s meat is another person’s poison. Every piece of advice I’ve given or been given has probably been contradicted by experience at some point. The only question I try to come back to again and again is, “Do I like this?” Saying that, a friend of mine recently read a book by Bob Hope’s joke writer in which he said Hope would always ask of a routine: “Where’s the biggie?” Eg where’s the big laugh that makes it all worth it? I like that. It’s simple, unpretentious and leaves you room to solve the problem any way you like.

HB: When I first started stand up and the nerves were constant someone (I can't remember who, maybe the advise wasn't that good) said "What are you worried about? As soon as you walk up there you're braver than 99% of the people in the room, so you've already won."

KH: Use vocabulary that a six-year-old can understand. 

James Macfarlane

James Macfarlane

Broadway Baby's Comedy Editor and Scotland Editor. In a previous life James did the same thing for ScotsGay. But we poached him.

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