In a year when laughter feels like both rebellion and relief, the Edinburgh Fringe’s debut comedians are redefining what comedy means. Their shows aren’t just entertainment — they’re essays on identity, absurdity, and survival. Counter Culture explores how this new wave of performers turns humour into resistance.

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Every August, the Fringe becomes a mirror — not just for the arts, but for the anxieties and contradictions of the age. The debut comedians stepping onto its stages this year (2–26 August 2025) are not simply chasing laughs; they are testing the boundaries of what comedy can say about who we are.

Comedy, at its best, has always been a form of resistance. From the cabarets of Weimar Berlin to the satire clubs of 1980s Soho, humour has thrived in times of uncertainty. It is the art of turning discomfort into connection — of finding solidarity in absurdity. The new generation of performers emerging at the Fringe seem acutely aware of that lineage. Their work is not escapist in the shallow sense, but rather a way of reframing the chaos of modern life into something bearable, even beautiful.

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Caroline McEvoy – Train Man

📍 Assembly Roxy (RoxyBoxy) at 1:20pm, 2–26 August
A captivating, hilarious and heartfelt tale of sibling rivalry in post‑Troubles Northern Ireland, Train Man sees McEvoy — host of the Chortle Award‑winning Comedy Bandits and three‑time Funny Women Stage Awards nominee — reckon with her lifelong battle with her autistic younger brother, who loves trains and getting his own way.

McEvoy’s stand‑up blends sharp Northern wit with emotional storytelling, making her one of the most compelling new voices in Irish comedy.

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Su Mi – ThisMotherPhucker

📍 Underbelly Cowgate (Iron Belly) at 6:40pm, 2–26 August
Award‑winning stand‑up and drag performance artist Su Mi presents an immersive, surreal comedy extravaganza that resurrects forgotten nostalgia and heals the inner child through play. Their show dismantles stereotypes of Asian women and challenges comedy’s narrative through intersectional, queer, and punk‑infused chaos.

Su Mi’s work fuses drag, theatre, and social commentary, creating a genre‑defying experience that’s as cathartic as it is anarchic.

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Becky Umbers – Put That Cat Back in the Bag

📍 Assembly Roxy (Snug Bar) at 8:40pm, 2–26 August
New Zealand’s award‑winning comedian Becky Umbers dives into the delicate art of keeping your metaphorical cat — your inner weirdo — hidden. Her joyous debut hour mixes cartoonish voice work with cheeky adult wit, exploring why we hide our quirks to fit in.

Umbers’ blend of absurdism and warmth has made her one of the most exciting rising stars from the Antipodes.

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Cabbage the Clown – Cinemadrome

📍 Underbelly Buttercup at 9:45pm, 2–26 August
A minimum‑wage cinema employee turned viral tragic fool, Cabbage the Clown brings a multimedia drag‑clowning spectacle about queer heartbreak, consumerism, and popcorn‑covered despair. Cinemadrome is part parody, part social critique, and wholly chaotic.

With over eight million views online, Cabbage’s mix of clowning and drag transforms everyday drudgery into surreal, glitter‑stained rebellion.

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Ada & Bron – The Origin of Love

📍 Pleasance Courtyard (Attic) at 11pm, 2–26 August
BAFTA‑nominated newcomers Ada & Bron invite audiences to third‑wheel their absurd, kaleidoscopic exploration of cursed couples, doomed romances, and the beautiful chaos of human connection. The Origin of Love unfolds as a patchwork of vignettes, confessional letters, and romantic misfires, each one stitched together with the duo’s signature blend of surrealism and emotional candour. It’s a show that treats love not as a tidy narrative arc but as a mythology — messy, contradictory, and often very funny — built from longing, miscommunication, and the strange rituals we invent to feel less alone.

Ada & Bron’s partnership blends theatrical invention with a startling emotional honesty, creating character comedy that’s both strange and soulful. They move with the ease of performers who trust each other completely, slipping between personas and emotional registers with a kind of mischievous grace. What makes their debut so compelling is the way it balances the grotesque with the tender, the ridiculous with the sincere. Beneath the heightened characters and absurd scenarios lies a quiet truth: that connection, in all its flawed and feral forms, is still the thing we’re all reaching for.

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Ted Milligan – United

📍 Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three) at 9:45pm, 2–26 August
Sketch Off Winner 2024 Ted Milligan’s United is a live mockumentary following a fictional football club’s desperate bid for redemption. Inspired by Sunderland ’Til I Die, it’s a whip‑smart, character‑driven comedy about loyalty, hope, and the absurdity of fandom.

Milligan’s background in sketch and character work gives his debut a cinematic rhythm and a distinctly British heart.

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The Mayor and His Daughter – A Genuine Appreciation of Comedy

📍 Assembly Roxy (Snug Bar) at 4:10pm, 2–26 August
Leicester Square Sketch Off finalists Ciaran Chillingworth and Kit Finnie bring a folk‑horror sketch show about Englishness, identity, and the demonic forces of modern Britain. When their village discovers a sacred tome — a box set of Russell Howard’s Good News — chaos and catharsis ensue.

The duo’s surreal, literary approach to sketch comedy makes them one of the most original partnerships at this year’s Fringe.

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Douglas Widick – Paperclip

📍 Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (The Penny) at 10:20pm, 2–26 August
Microsoft Word’s Clippy returns in Widick’s high‑energy musical comedy adventure through the internet’s retro past, and it’s every bit as unhinged and nostalgic as that premise suggests. Paperclip is a full‑throttle, interactive romp that treats the early web like a mythic landscape — dial‑up tones as battle cries, pop‑ups as omens, and forgotten mascots as fallen gods. Packed with rock tributes, improvised detours, and a kind of joyous digital archaeology, the show revels in the absurdity of a time when the internet still felt like a frontier rather than a marketplace.

A celebrated New York performer, Widick brings a musical improv background that gives the hour a frenetic, infectious pulse. He moves with the confidence of someone who understands that nostalgia isn’t just comfort — it’s a cultural archive, a way of remembering who we were before algorithms learned to anticipate our desires. Beneath the silliness lies a surprisingly sharp commentary on obsolescence, usefulness, and the fear of being left behind in a world that updates faster than we can. In Widick’s hands, Clippy becomes both a punchline and a prophet, guiding the audience through a past that feels increasingly like a warning about the future.

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Jacob Nussey – Primed

📍 Pleasance Courtyard (Bunker Three) at 7:15pm, 2–26 August
Award‑winning comedian Jacob Nussey unboxes the absurdities of warehouse life in his Amazon‑themed debut, peeling back the layers of a world built on scanners, quotas, and the quiet indignities of minimum‑wage survival. With his trademark deadpan precision, he explores working‑class aspiration and corporate absurdity, finding humour in the places where ambition meets algorithm. Primed becomes a kind of workplace archaeology — a look at the systems that shape us, the compromises we make to get by, and the strange camaraderie that forms in the fluorescent hum of a distribution centre.

Chortle’s “One to Watch” 2023, Nussey’s understated delivery hides razor‑sharp social insight. He has a gift for turning the mundane into the quietly revelatory, for exposing the surreal logic of modern labour without ever losing the human thread. What makes his debut stand out is the clarity of his perspective: dry, incisive, and unafraid to poke at the gap between how companies talk about work and how it actually feels to do it. In Nussey’s hands, the comedy of survival becomes something both bleakly funny and unexpectedly hopeful — a reminder that even in the most automated environments, the human element refuses to disappear.

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Josh Elton – Away with the Fairies

📍 Hoots @ The Apex (Hoots 4) at 8pm, 2–26 August
Elton’s debut blends rapid‑fire stand‑up with vivid, almost cinematic storytelling, moving between identity, humiliation, and the strange, fragile places where we try to locate meaning. His world is one where fairy curses sit comfortably alongside playground trauma, where the ridiculous and the painful coexist without ever cancelling each other out. The result is a show that is both riotous and unexpectedly tender — a reminder that the stories we tell about ourselves are often funnier, stranger, and more revealing than we intend.

A natural storyteller, Elton has a gift for turning personal embarrassment into communal recognition. His mix of absurdism and vulnerability gives the hour a restless emotional charge, the sense of someone excavating their own past not for catharsis but for connection. What makes him stand out among this year’s newcomers is the precision with which he balances silliness and sincerity: he can land a joke with the speed of a seasoned comic, then pivot into something quietly affecting without losing the room. It’s comedy that feels alive to the messiness of being human — and generous enough to let the audience see themselves in it.

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Rohan Sharma – Mad Dog

📍 Pleasance Courtyard (Below) at 7:10pm, 2–26 August
British‑Indian comedian and Leicester Square New Comedian champion Rohan Sharma delivers a surreal, multimedia odyssey through identity, race, and modern Britain. Mad Dog ricochets between sincerity and absurdity, weaving together confession, cultural critique, and outright chaos. What emerges is a densely layered exploration of truth and lies — the stories we inherit, the ones we invent, and the ones we cling to when the world refuses to make sense. Sharma treats identity not as a fixed category but as a shifting, glitching interface, corrupted and nourished in equal measure by the pressures of contemporary life.

Sharma’s sharp intellect and theatrical flair make his debut one of the most ambitious at the Fringe. He moves with the confidence of a performer who understands that comedy can be both a scalpel and a smoke bomb — cutting through the noise while simultaneously destabilising it. His humour is restless, probing, and deliberately disorienting, inviting the audience into a space where contradictions aren’t resolved but illuminated. Beneath the surrealism lies something unmistakably human: a search for belonging in a country that can’t decide what it is, or who gets to feel at home in it.

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Steffan Alun – Stand Up

📍 Hoots @ The Apex (Hoots 4) at 9:30pm, 2–26 August
Welsh optimist Steffan Alun finally presents his full debut hour — a rich, raucous blend of politics, sexuality, and unapologetic queerness. What begins as playful irreverence gradually reveals itself as something more deliberate: a quietly radical insistence on joy, on community, on the right to take up space without apology. His comedy moves with the rhythm of someone who has spent years thinking about identity not as a fixed point but as a landscape — shifting, contradictory, and often very funny.

Seen on BBC Wales and S4C, Alun brings a proudly Welsh perspective to the stage, one shaped by a neurodivergent lens that sharpens both his humour and his humanity. He has a knack for turning personal chaos into collective recognition, for finding the soft underbelly of a political moment and pressing just hard enough to make the room laugh before it winces. It’s not just the punchlines but the warmth: a sense that comedy, in Alun’s hands, becomes a small act of defiance — a reminder that joy is something we build together, especially when the world feels brittle.

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These performers share a common thread: they treat comedy not as escape, but as confrontation. Their work reflects a generation living through economic precarity, political fatigue, and digital overload — yet still finding ways to laugh, connect, and resist. In their hands, comedy becomes a form of empathy, a way to reclaim joy from cynicism.

As the Fringe approaches, Counter Culture will be watching closely. The question is not simply who will make us laugh, but who will make us think — and, perhaps, who will remind us that laughter itself is an act of resistance.

By Pat Harrington

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Picture Credits

• Caroline McEvoy — photography by Rebecca Need‑Menear
• Su Mi — photography by Michael Julings
• Cabbage the Clown — photography by Lina Sakoviča
• Ada & Bron — photography by Michael Julings
• Ted Milligan — photography by Rebecca Need‑Menear
• The Mayor and His Daughter — photography by Jamie Mckaela
• Jacob Nussey — photography by Andy Hollingworth
• Josh Elton — photography by Michelle Huggleston
• Rohan Sharma — photography by Rebecca Need‑Menear and Michael Julings
• Steffan Alun — photography by Michelle Huggleston