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Pizza Geeks Serves Comedy Toppings

Kate Copstick Kate Copstick
12 Jul 2026

The Edinburgh Fringe has been, over the years, many things to many people. Not all of them good. It is an arena, a combative place and now an expensive place. It is no longer a place where the young and passionate can bring their treasured works, find a space, fling it all at the wall and see what sticks.

The Fringe's freshest voices are finding a home – just not where you'd expect.

The new "professional" Fringe might be glossy with TV names and slick with PR/ChatGPT soundbites, but that comes at a cost – and the cost is its basic humanity. What used to be the stuff of dreams is now part of an industry, which makes it a tough place to get in on the ground floor, fighting for the same audiences, the same reviews and the same attention as 'him off the telly'.

But down – and, sadly, it still is down – on the Free Fringe, something marvellous is stirring.

I am sure they will not thank me for the name, but a comedy nursery has been created, curated and is being mentored by Steve McLean as part of the PBH Free Fringe at Pizza Geeks on Easter Road.

Twenty debut acts are on the roster, performing for a week each, running the gamut from sketch and Elvis-influenced cabaret through romcom, true stories of building a feminist doughnut empire, improv, one-liners, absurdism, dhol drums and a short play about the importance of wet wipes. If it were an entire Fringe, it would be an impressively eclectic programme. Given that it is one single venue, it is something quite extraordinary. Unless, of course, the shows are all dire.

But Steve McLean is supremely confident. He has been "kicking around" with the PBH Free Fringe in various capacities since 2014, as well as, more recently, running the West End New Act of the Year. And this year he is achieving one of his personal goals: to organise something for new acts at the Fringe. A huge number of his 'new' acts tell him they don't feel able to come to the Fringe because it is a closed shop, too big and too 'industrial'. Even the seemingly endless rounds of variously sponsored competitions that take place in August have degenerated into what Steve perfectly describes as "a circle-jerk".

He believes that working-class comics have been purposely 'priced out' of the mainstream Fringe (oxymoron of the day!). "Working-class comics attract a working-class audience and working-class audiences don't spend as much as middle-class audiences," he says. Difficult to argue with that.

Added to the ongoing determination of PBH Free Fringe to keep the Fringe open and accessible, his pitch to have an entire venue hosting debut shows was strengthened by an increasing appetite among Leith residents for more shows available locally.

They are spoiled for choice this year. In Steve's Pizza Geeks nursery alone there are 20 different shows, each running for a week. This, he explains, works for two reasons. "PBH says, 'The streets of Edinburgh are littered with the corpses of comics who had a good 15 minutes and came to do an hour-long show,'" says Steve, who has persuaded his performers to dip their funny bones into the murky depths of Edinburgh for a week, just to start with. Added to that, local comedy fans simply will not run out of new funny from one end of August to the other. To say nothing of the fact that fledgling performers don't get burned out and despondent, having given their all only to find that most of the interest goes to someone who has only ever been seen in something with 'Celebrity' in the title. Yes, that someone is there if you look.

Steve believes it should not have fallen to the PBH Free Fringe, operating with a volunteer staff, to create and curate this splendidly egalitarian launching pad for new talent at the Fringe. And he has a quite brilliant idea for an alternative. Or an addendum.

Few whine on about how money has taken over, and the toxic miasma of grossly oversized venues stifling the grassroots of the Fringe, more than I do. Steve says he would be happy to forgive all of that if each of the Big Four set aside just one small room and ran it as Pizza Geeks is being run. Think how much good would be done for the grassroots. He points out that all of the Big Four have many, many rooms of a very Fringe-friendly size.

Of course business is business, and the Big Four are big business, but surely, as Steve puts it, "it wouldn't hurt them to throw a bone the other way ..." Or even a pizza crust.

It is a thought.

Now, as expected, Steve is unwilling to single out any of his babies for special attention. So you will just have to check the listings and see what has come leaping from the unknown to pique your interest.

Almost like being at Fringe, eh?

Kate Copstick

Kate Copstick

Probably the most famous critic at the Fringe, Kate has previously been a judge of the Perrier Comedy and Malcolm Hardee Awards. As The Scotsman's chief comedy critic, her opinions have made and sometimes buried the careers of many an aspiring comic. Kate also spends much time in Kenya working with abused women and their families with her Mama Biashara charity, working to set these women up in small businesses, thus making them financially independent.

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