Edinburgh Fringe 2025 is flipping the stereotype script. Eleven plus-size comedians are staking their claim—upending fatphobia, celebrating fullness, and packing the festival with shows that brim over with bold truths and belly laughs. Each act proves that the richest humour often arrives in the most generously proportioned packages.
- Mari Volar – Common Ground
Mari Volar transforms the stage into a living laboratory of connection. In Common Ground, she invites total strangers into an improvisational dance—threading feminist insights through playful banter, then coaxing out the silliest thing they share. Expect a charismatic whirlwind of crowd work that reminds us how laughter unites even the most unlikely companions. - Kat Powell – Why Am I Like This?
Part memoir, part roast-session, Kat Powell’s hour is a roller-coaster through adolescence and family legacies. Armed with razor-sharp wit, she skewers the people who shaped her—then gleefully turns the blade on herself. It’s cringe-laden nostalgia, peppered with savage honesty, that proves self-deprecation can still be an act of fierce self-love. - Jack Scullion – Don’t Mess It Up Jack
After a well-publicized 2023 Fringe meltdown, poet-comedian Jack Scullion returns with a manifesto for self-acceptance. Don’t Mess It Up Jack stitches together two years of therapy sessions, a plus-size influencer wedding and a daring moment of on-camera toplessness. His blend of heartfelt poetry and riotous humour charts a journey from shame to liberation. - Stuart Thomas – Bad Fatty
Welshman Stuart Thomas fuses his sheep-farming roots with a modern body-positive battle cry. In Bad Fatty, he tears into diet culture and societal expectations with working-class gusto. The result is an unapologetic stand-up hour that roars with authenticity—and lands each punchline like a runaway sheepdog. - Mel McGlensey – MOTORBOAT
Equal parts maritime farce and fearless clowning, MOTORBOAT is Mel McGlensey’s seaborne fantasia. She literally becomes part woman, part vessel—battling stormy slapstick and nautical nonsense in a show that earned five-star praise for its outrageous inventiveness. Prepare for physical comedy that sails you straight into uncharted belly-laugh territory. - Amanda Hursy – Carted
If life wrote your crime drama, it’d read like Carted. Amanda Hursy recounts a Netflix-worthy spree of brushes with the law, serving up true-crime hilarity with a wink. Her gift for transforming chaos into crystal-clear storytelling makes every “you can’t make this up” moment feel both impossible and irresistible. - Mel McGlensey – NORMAL
In this world premiere, Mel invites you to define “normal” in real time. Audience votes steer a clowning experiment that proves the concept evaporates under absurdity’s glare. It’s a collaborative tour de force—one that hammers home how our need for normalcy collapses once we unleash collective creativity. - Justina Seselskaite – Best in Class
Lithuanian import Justina Seselskaite slices through working-class struggle and immigrant life with precision. In Best in Class, she skewers Wetherspoons woes and bisexual coming-of-age dramas in a set that’s sharp, unflinching and darkly hilarious. Her insider-outsider lens refracts social critique into uproarious truth. - Rabiah Coon & Shuang Teng – Asian American Cultural Confusion
This split-bill pairs American expat Rabiah Coon with British-Chinese comic Shuang Teng to explore diasporic double lives. From the calorie counts of “another stone to lose” to childhood rituals left behind, they riff on identity with warmth and wit. It’s a two-headed dive into cultural collision that refuses to play by one nation’s script. - Ray Fordyce – Quincunx
Ray Fordyce builds a personal quilt of tales around his favourite word. Quincunx winds through awkward school days, gaming obsessions and love affairs with language itself. His conversational style invites you into life’s geometry—revealing how every anecdote, no matter how small, connects to a shared human pattern. - Bobby Sheehan & Mark Henely – Roast Me! Praise Me!
Two veterans of New York’s Roast Battle scene face off in a carnival of insult and adulation. Bobby craves the burn; Mark dissolves at a kind word. In Roast Me! Praise Me!, the audience wields the power—choosing whether to torch or exalt each performer. It’s a live-wired experiment in the pleasure and pain of words.
This Fringe, these eleven comedians demand we clear the stage for voices that don’t fit the old moulds. Immerse yourself in laughter that’s as big and bright as the lives it celebrates.
By Pat Harrington with help from Stuart Thomas
