Edinburgh Fringe performer Derek Mitchell wants a genre-agnostic world

All live comedy is theatre. That might sound provocative, but think about it: whether it’s conceptual clown or surreal sketch or Live At The Apollo, it all involves performers on stage inviting an audience to suspend their disbelief (eg that you are not funny, that they wish they’d stayed home, that this material is in fact not fresh) and come along for the ride.

On the other hand – and maybe even more provocatively – I’d argue that all good theatre contains something comedic. Comedy, as Aristotle (Greek influencer) would say, illuminates differences between ourselves and others. Shakespeare does this and so does Natalie Palamides.

The weird thing to me is how frequently it seems like theatre people balk at the desire to make things funny. And the way comedy people can bristle at pathos (Greek term for an emo). Theatre people don’t like joke density, and comedy people don’t like things that feel like a play. As someone who likes when things are funny and have pathos, I often feel like I’ve got one foot in both camps.

Why am I like this

I came to England in 2015 to study English and, in the meantime, become Emma Thompson. Through my childhood and teens the funny people I loved most were those who started out doing big, character-led sketch and stand-up, then dabbled in more dramatic work as time went on: Emma (first name basis though we’ve never met), Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg, Olivia Colman, Mike Nichols.

Of course over time I’ve diversified my tastes and have come to love work by all kinds of funny and dramatic people and everyone in between (like Cole Escola, Kate Berlant, Diane Chorley). There’s something about a marriage between the dazzlingly, absurdly funny and something real, felt and emotionally true, which continues to be my north star as an artist.

I started out writing and performing with my comedy partner Kathy Maniura, and we made sketch comedy that also felt like a play. This is what made sense to us, though it unfortunately did not make sense to basically anyone else. All kinds of people would point out that it was, for example, ‘confusing’ and ‘not comedy.’

I also think it was often not good. Which is a key factor: I do not mean to claim that anything trying to be funny and also be a play is necessarily good. Often this kind of juvenalia is absolutely, toe-curlingly cringe. Which is also part of the deal: most people do not walk out of the womb (that would be satanic) also fully formed as comedians. Lara Ricote might be an exception.

You have to make some (often many) bad things along the way towards discovering the point of intersection between what you want to make and what people want to see you do. And this journey ideally involves care, custodianship, patronage, support, community, encouragement, little peaks and valleys followed by hopefully peaks again.

 I do believe that if you are more firmly in the camps of either theatre or comedy, these ingredients are sometimes more readily available. Community forms around a shared set of values, and when you have cherry-picked your values in a way that feels weird as hell to people, you’re going to have to deal with the consequences.

For a long time I felt like I was fumbling around in a dark valley full of haunted cherry trees. And then I experienced unexpected internet success on accounts called @letsdoubledutch. Suddenly I had an audience, a clearer grasp of my comedic voice, and the opportunity to tour extensively. Stand-up hadn’t really been on my vision board, but newfound momentum forced me to hone my act and find ways to integrate real feelings intuitively rather than sentimentally.

Notes on comedy

But even when these elements are combined successfully – like in Hannah Gadsby’s work – they’re still frequently dismissed as ‘not comedy’. Notably, Richard Gadd, beloved by the comedy establishment, faced nowhere near the same scrutiny as Nanette for similarly theatrical and emotionally-driven work. I suspect Gadsby’s being a queer woman had something to do with it.

I believe the way comedy gestures to itself, highlighting our own perceptions (re: Aristotle), has lots to do with the person who’s delivering the comedy. Many reviews of my work have described me as ‘camp’ – which I will go to my grave contesting. Not because I don’t love camp. I capital-L LOVE Alan Carr, Moira Dubois, Simon David. But camp is an aesthetic category with a specific, historical definition. 

My work is weird and absurdist and often grotesque – which are distinct categories from camp. I suspect some reviewers conflate these qualities with just being gay (to be fair, all can be annoying). The way I gesture towards the ideas in my work doesn’t quite work for them. Which is okay! There’s lots of great and self-aware comedy that also doesn’t work for me (ask me about it later). 

It’s okay to not like things. Good art and good criticism are both led by taste. Having taste involves knowing and naming what you definitely don’t like and then engaging critically with it. 

And conversely, good comedic and theatrical works frequently blend elements in unexpected ways. The wider, global world (beyond our little comedy and theatre ones) loves stuff that’s unexpected, genre-agnostic and truthful. 

Nearly all of the Edinburgh shows that have experienced breakthrough global success through series and specials and West End runs achieve this (though I’m definitely not saying global success is the bar for something being good).

So why do we seem to adhere to and police genre orthodoxies so intensely in our little comedy and theatre worlds? I personally don’t get it. But I’m not complaining, and frankly the unnevenness of the playing field has, I think, made me better and more agile. I’m incredibly grateful for the way my career has gone to now – I earn my living as a comedian, I perform for thousands of people a year and I get to do what I love, which is be an artist who makes people laugh.

I am… a goblin

For now, this is mainly through stand-up for an audience of people who want something pretty specific from me. But I also make weird other stuff alongside it, like my dark comedy theatre show Goblin, which I’ve been developing for longer even than @letsdoubledutch has been online.

 It started life as clowney-character comedy and this year it’s programmed at the Edinburgh Fringe as theatre at Summerhall, after a thwarted initial outing last year in a yurt that collapsed halfway through the run.

At every turn, industry people have expressed encouragement but hesitation (and sometimes bewilderment) about Goblin. To now I’ve entirely self-funded Goblin with money I’ve earned doing stand-up. But truthfully I couldn’t do one without the other. 

• Derek Mitchell: Goblin is on at Summerhall at 9.50pm during the Edinburgh Fringe.  

Published: 28 Jul 2025