The best joke award has gone. Is the Edinburgh fringe taking all the pun out of comedy?
Launched in 2008, the award set out to distil the spirit of the festival into a single one-liner. Longlisted by a panel of critics and then voted on by the public, it aimed to showcase the sharpest bite-size humour from that year's fringe. Still, the announcement was never without controversy. In 2023, when Lorna Rose Treen took the title with the joke 'I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah', she was met with a wave of online criticism (the Sun claimed her win had 'killed comedy'). Last year, an article in the Herald deemed the award Edinburgh's 'most heated controversy'.
The backlash feels somewhat overblown for an award that was simply a celebration of something meant to make people laugh. Comedy is inherently subjective, and everyone is never going to like exactly the same thing. But we all like a good (or at least eye-roll-worthy) joke. Just look at how much time we dedicate to reading the ones from Christmas crackers; it's not necessarily about their quality, but the shared joy they bring.
On this level, the award made sense. Digestible punchlines are entertaining – we can steal them for ourselves, repeat them in our social circles and hopefully elicit some hearty snorts. And at one of the world's biggest comedy festivals, it's hardly surprising that people would want to crown the year's most crowd-pleasing quip. Still, the idea that the art of live comedy can be condensed into a single line is undeniably flawed. How many times have you been told a 'funny story' and found yourself unmoved?
The act of relaying humour is a difficult task. For standup in particular, a joke can't be separated from its setting. While the fringe's best joke list tended to be pun-heavy, jokes don't always land in isolation. They live in a comedian's energy, the crowd's mood and the rhythm of the moment. Stripped of this context and presented simply as written words in a list, even the most dynamic line can fall flat.
Perhaps that's why the list often felt underwhelming: it ignored the bigger picture. There's no mention of physical comedy, timing or tone, which are crucial ingredients to bringing humour to life onstage. The shows that made me laugh hardest across the festival, as both a critic and, more recently, as a judge on the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, rarely got a look in from the best joke award list. Last year's winner for best newcomer, Joe Kent-Walters, transformed himself into Frankie Monroe, a Rotherham working men's club MC, complete with corpse-like, Sudocrem-white face paint and leering movements. Did his hour consist of neat, packable humour? Absolutely not, but it was genuine, full-body comedy that stayed with me long after the show ended.
Similarly, the year before, Julia Masli's show, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, became a word-of-mouth hit. Masli, a clown by training, took on the role of an agony aunt of few words. There was nothing close to a standard joke in her act; instead, it lived on the curiously trusting relationship she built with the audience. There were plenty of confessions and practical solutions, but no linguistic wit. It was all the funnier for it.
It is unlikely that anyone reading the best joke award lists from years gone by would have let out a guffaw. But that doesn't take away from the fact that the award was a welcome addition to the general merriment of the fringe – so much so that the unofficial ISH Comedy Awards have announced that they'd be running their own best joke award this year. The punchline can live on. That, at least, should be a cause for celebration.
Anya Ryan is a freelance journalist. She was a member of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards judging panel in 2023 and 2024
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