'My earliest and most revolting ideas revealed themselves' says comic Paul Hilleard

How do you write a stand-up comedy show? How important is it to nail your debut hour? Nobody really tells you. Some people give you advice, but how do you know when you’re ready? I started a podcast with my friend Emma Hughes to document the messy process of figuring it all out.

Has It Got Legs? started when Emma was hanging around at my place before a gig and she saw my box of jokes. Everything I've ever written since I was 16 I’ve stored in a box. It's a physical manifest of the most embarrassing and genius parts of my brain. 

Everyone has their own box, a cache of unfinished ideas and half baked thoughts they’re too shy to share. Yours might be poems, recipes, designs, illustrations etc etc, but mine are jokes and Emma reads them out loud and laughs at them, and me, for all to hear. 

I’d been talking with Emma about how to write an Edinburgh hour: ‘What’s a theme?’, ‘I wanna just do bits’. ‘What does cohesion mean?’ and Emma suggested going through the box together to try to find the common threads that exist in my material so that I could piece together my debut. 

It quickly devolved into hilarity as some of my earliest and most revolting ideas revealed themselves. The podcast is now a weird balance between chatting about the highly stressful privilege of debuting at Edinburgh, the creative process, and having a giggle with a mate.

Edinburgh is a beast with more pressures on it than ever before. There are so many things to consider before you even start writing the show or arrive in the city. It’s a financial burden with lots of considerations, the cost of PR, price of accommodation (while paying your rent back home), and the cost of being in Edinburgh. 

It is hard to organise a venue, whether that’s in the free Fringe or a more established venue. All this as well as the other important life things that it can impact, whether or not it’s even possible to take time off work or be away from your family, the effects it has on your relationships, health and routine. 

You have all those stresses (and probably more) before you even get to the material, writing the show, the reason you’re doing the fucking thing. Nearly a year before the Fringe, you have to know what your show will be about, blindly writing bios, submitting applications and before you’ve done any work in progress shows, with a vague idea of what you want it to be. As an artist your blind faith / delusion / occasional belief forces you to craft the show over time.

What I am trying to say is Edinburgh Fringe is one giant headfuck. You feel like you are pissing your life up the wall to follow your dreams. This lack of direction and the feeling of going in blind as a new act led to the podcast. We’re two idiot comedians, with a few awards between us, and we’re just trying to figure it out. 

Over the course of 30 episodes, Emma, who has a degree in dramaturgy, goes through my old box of jokes, pulling apart what is good and bad. The blind lead the blind, and it all culminated into my first hour of standup comedy, Grogg. I’m performing Grogg right now at the world’s biggest arts festival abd showroom for industry people.

Has It Got Legs? documents the whole creative process of trying to become a full-time comedian while juggling a full-time job as a teaching assistant, the long drives to work, in-progress shows performed to three people, the highs of opening for bigger acts, and killer club gigs. 

We talk about the constant rollercoaster of thinking you’re the dog’s bollocks after one good gig and then crashing down into horrible anxiety and doubt after bombing. We love it all and celebrate the failure in being a creative person. Listen along as we fling shit out of the box against the wall and see what sticks…

What’s next? A sophomore hour for Paul and a debut for Emma. It never ends. Get on board!

• Paul Hilleard: Grogg is on at 22:40 at Monkey Barrel during the Edinburgh Fringe.

Published: 24 Aug 2026