Why are we so obsessed with funniest joke of the Fringe lists? | By Laura Lexx and Oliver Double

Why are we so obsessed with funniest joke of the Fringe lists?

By Laura Lexx and Oliver Double

Every year the Edinburgh Fringe runs, with hundreds of venues hosting thousands of performers spewing hundreds of thousands of jokes. Reliably though, the thing that usually gets most the press attention across the UK is Dave’s Joke of the Fringe – which would traditionally have been posted today. But not this year.

The cancellation of this year’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe competition was also widely covered by major news sources. But was the outcry because we were losing something totally beloved? Well, not quite… Since it started in 2008, this annual contest has often been at the receiving end of journalistic brickbats. This came to a head in 2023 when Lorna Rose Treen won for her gag, ‘I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah’. The Independent’s Ryan Coogan described it as ‘something that would be rejected from a discount Christmas cracker’, and the MailOnline came up with the headline, ‘If this is the best joke the Edinburgh Fringe can offer, then woke really HAS killed comedy’. 

Given this kind of disdain, why does the Funniest Joke of the Fringe still generate so much interest?

That’s exactly the kind of question we like to investigate at The Comedy Bureau, in which we discuss the history and theory of comedy. As people who have long experience of writing and analysing jokes, we feel well-placed to address this conundrum.

One of the main criticisms of the competition is that it is reductive to pluck a single joke from an hour-long show and shear away crucial nonverbal elements like vocal delivery, facial expression, physicality, persona and rapport. Even the MailOnline’s Tom Utley acknowledged that he ‘wasn’t in the audience’ for Treen’s show and ‘an awful lot depends on timing and delivery.’ 

Arguably, Treen’s joke suffered more than most from being decontextualised. Her show featured multiple characters and the winning gag was a lot funnier when delivered by her absurdist take on a hard-bitten film noir dame, dispensing wonky one-liners and wild non-sequiturs between a plethora of cigarette-based sight gags.

Some critics, like The Guardian’s Brian Logan, have argued that the Fringe’s most memorable comic moments are nonverbal, citing performers like Jenny Fawcett, Kumail Nanjani and the sketch group Pappy’s. To add our own example, in 2013 Bridget Christie’s slapstick mime of being unable to hold on to a Bic ballpoint did not have the remotest chance of being nominated for Funniest Joke of the Fringe, relying as it did on physical rather than verbal comic dexterity.   

Another criticism is that the competition favours a particular type of joke, especially puns. In 2024, 11 of the 15 shortlisted jokes were based on some kind of pun, involving wordplay and double meanings. 

Historically, puns have been scorned by key thinkers about comedy. Freud called them, ‘the lowest form of verbal joke, probably because they are the "cheapest" – can be made with the least trouble.’ Similarly, alternative comedy pioneer Tony Allen confessed to being a ‘pun snob’, and called the pun ‘a meaningless construction that unites two ideas or concepts that have nothing in common other than the fact that they share or have been allocated the same or similar sounding words.’ 

However, some one-liners involve more than well-turned puns, playing host to more interesting content. George Orwell argued for the subversive potential of joking, writing in 1944: ‘A thing is funny when – in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening – it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution… Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny’.

A few of the gags on the 2024 shortlist seem to offer some sort of comedic challenge to the established order. Take Sophie Duker’s offering: ‘Keir Starmer looks like an AI-generated image of a substitute teacher.’ This brings the Prime Minister down with a bump, by targeting the vacuous image-making that has attempted to sell him to the public as a dull but capable adult in the room. 

Chelsea Birkby’s gag has a subtler target: ‘British etiquette is so confusing. Why is it highbrow to look at boobs in an art gallery but lowbrow when I get them out in Spoons?’ By pointing out differing attitudes to female nudity in high and low culture, Birkby’s gag could be seen as a comedic counterpart to the iconic Guerrilla Girls poster which asks, ‘Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?’ Meanwhile, Olga Koch’s joke speaks for itself: ‘Growing up rich is a hereditary condition. It affects 1 per cent of people.’

Whatever people thought about the jokes themselves, it’s obvious that the lists themselves prompted a reaction. 

Perhaps we gobbled up the Best Jokes list through some sort of nostalgia for the printed joke books a lot of us had as children? Getting a joke makes us feel clever and on the inside of a secret language. The way they make us feel superior is one argument for the dopamine hit that humour provides. Therefore, perhaps a person’s anger when they dislike a joke comes from a form of rejection? If you are handed a joke and told it’s popular but it leaves you cold, you are rejected from the majority.

What the Best Jokes list made clear is that there is appetite for humour. It also showed up the intense failure rate of jokes stripped from their individual unique habitats. And in a world where more and more comedy content is carved up and presented in bitesize pieces online, perhaps we should be begging people to return to good old fashioned full length shows to get their comedy hit and receive the full potential of jokes in the wild. 

The Comedy Bureau, a factual YouTube series from comedian Laura Lexx and Dr Oliver Double, an academic at the University of Kent who has published a number of books about comedy, launches in September.

Published: 18 Aug 2025

We see you are using AdBlocker software. Chortle relies on advertisers to fund this website so it’s free for you, so we would ask that you disable it for this site. Our ads are non-intrusive and relevant. Help keep Chortle viable.