While the Edinburgh Fringe seems intent on pricing out home-grown talent, year upon year a stronghold of Scottish comedians continues to find its way to the festival by any means necessary. This time around, it’s thanks to lifelines like the newly formed Brass Tacks Debut Hour Fund, the Keep it Fringe Fund and the Best in Class Bursary that a fresh crop of comics, forged in the city’s year-round clubs, are able to burst onto the scene. Among them are the likes of Cumbernauld comedian Jack Traynor, Edinburgh’s own Ayo Adenekan, and Glasgow comics Hannah Morton and Amanda Hursy.
Jack Traynor has quickly built himself an international audience online by ripping the piss out of other comics on the local scene. Although that might sound more like the way to get your lights punched out than a career path, he’s done it all as part of Roast Battle, an international league of comedy insults where lines like “Ryan [Cullen] looks like the alien that abducted me” has introduced the world to his signature style: a chaotic mix of self-deprecation and absurdist imagery that he describes as “two raccoons scrapping in a bin.” His razor-sharp debut hour Before I Forget promises a “back-to-basics” approach to stand-up wherein a good joke trumps any and all pressure to contrive a level of polish or self-reflection that just isn’t in his nature. “You might not be getting some thespian piece where I delve into my personality and we come to the conclusion that I’ve got some mental illness or something like that,” says Traynor in reference to what he feels is a growing trend of comedians aiming for awards first and laughs second. “I probably do [have one], but I try to make it funny.”
Traynor is part of a collective called Wholesome Prison Blues, which sees him gig in UK prisons alongside comics like Amanda Hursy. Hursy is no stranger to a prison cell, as she reveals in her own debut Fringe show Carted. After a grand total of seven arrests, the East Glasgow lassie had enough of having to put her personality behind bars. The cuffs are off in her show about being continually underestimated, pigeonholed and – as she discovered young, when she received an Olympic ‘School of Sport’ scholarship – held to a standard that doesn’t apply to her wealthier, more privileged counterparts. “The show is about the absurdity of my multiple arrests. Learning to laugh at my mistakes and challenging the judgement I’ve faced throughout my life,” she says. “Taking stand-up into prisons wasn’t just about cracking jokes, it was about stepping straight into fear, owning the moment, and proving that comedy has no boundaries… What started as an intimidating challenge turned into an unexpected kind of freedom. Because when you can get a gym hall full of inmates roaring with laughter, you know you can take your comedy anywhere.” What was she in for? You’ll have to buy a ticket to find out.
But while Hursy is unfazed by the back of a police van, for Ayo Adenekan, even the back of a bus can be a moral conundrum. While the Fringe might draw in audiences from all over the map, an Edinburgh upbringing has taught the 23 -year-old that for the other 11 months of the year, it can seem like he is one of less than a dozen Black people in the overwhelmingly white city. Black Mediocrity deals with the consequences of that lack of diversity (like overthinking what vibe you’re giving off on public transport) from the point of view of lived experience. In just two years on the circuit, Adenekan has cemented himself as a staple of the open mic comedy scene and came third in Gilded Balloon’s So You Think You’re Funny? competition last year, after Sir Billy Connolly Spirit of Glasgow Award-winner Rosco McClelland urged him to enter. Delivered with a lightness of touch and a breezy, laidback attitude, Adenekan takes a potentially tense topic and diffuses it with a few well chosen punchlines. The lens, at the end of the day, is most often turned on himself as a Black, queer 20-something just trying to figure things out.
If you like your existential crises a little more extreme, Hannah Morton’s Cha Cha Real Smooth lets the part of her brain that says, “What the fuck am I doing here?” do the bulk of the talking. After years of side hustling as a kids’ party entertainer, Morton is inviting her audience to attend a common scene in her life: A five year old’s birthday party at which she, as her alter ego Hannah Banana, is monstrously hungover. The show is an ode to the gig economy by a self-professed ‘accidental’ stand-up. A playwright first, “I’ve done [stand-up] the opposite way around,” she says. As opposed to building up her show five, 10, 20 minutes at a time, Morton penned the whole hour without having touched the stand-up circuit. It’s a huge risk, but one that paid off when she stormed its first performance at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival. The response has emboldened her to bring it to the Fringe, with a few preparatory stand-up gigs along the way. But although she’s aiming for match-fitness, she fully intends to go method on a few of those scripted hangovers…
Jack Traynor: Before I Forget, Pleasance Courtyard, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 11), 9.55pm
Amanda Hursy: Carted, Gilded Balloon Patter House, 30 Jul-25 Aug, 6.20pm
Ayo Adenekan: Black Mediocrity, Monkey Barrel Comedy, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 13), 1.30pm
Hannah Morton: Cha Cha Real Smooth, Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 11, 18), 5pm