...but only alphabetically

Forget all the shows that try to game their way to the top of the Edinburgh Fringe programme with garbage titles that start with things like ‘..000001%’ as if they were dodgy minicab firms in the Yellow Pages (ask your grandad). Plus they normally have crudely drawn artwork or an AI generated image, rather than anything professional.  Instead, here are 10 shows proudly on the back page of the comedy section of the Fringe’s alphabetical list.

1 Zoë Coombs Marr: The Splash Zone

A festival favourite both at the Fringe and in her native Australia,  Zoë Coombs Marr – an 2017 Edinburgh Comedy Award nominee in the guise of her unreconstructed male stand-up Dave – has  this year stripped back her usual high-concept meta-comedy for more straightforward stand-up. Expect silly and playful looks at misinformation, ADHD and rural Australia. 

Monkey Barrel Comedy 9.35pm

2. Ziwe: Ziwe's America

The New York based comedian – real name Ziwerekoru Fumudoh – starred in her own late-night variety sketch show Ziwe on US premium cable network in 2021 to 2022, where guests included prominent feminist Gloria Steinem, supermodel Emily Ratajkowski, and comedians including Hannibal Buress and Michael Che. She’s also written a collection of humorous essays, titled Black Friend. She’s paying only a flying visit to the Fringe, however.

Pleasance Courtyard, 10.30pm, August 20 to 23 only

3. Zero Lives Left

Not following the helpful convention of putting his name in the show title means American stand-up Benjie Wrubel’s down in the Zeds… but credit for not using ‘0 Lives Left’ to try to play the system.  It’s a bit of a mystery show – just half an hour in a paid-for venue from a comic with almost zero social media presence and a blurb that boasts ‘Benjie performs regularly in Aspen, Colorado, one of America's most iconic ski towns’. As for content, we are promised he’ll cover topics from ‘living with suicidal tendencies to the joys of bird watching.

Greenside @ George Street, 10.40pm

4 Zara Gladman is… Aileen: Cameron’s Gap Year Fundraiser

Glaswegian comedian Zara Gladman is known for her internet sketches revolving around West End mum Aileen, here taking centre stage among a series of characters as she tries to raise the money for her son’s gap year. The pilot of her TV sketch show airs on BBC Scotland at 9.40pm on Monday.

Monkey Barrel at The Hive, 7.35pm, July 29 to August 10 only

5. Zainab Johnson: Toxically Optimistic

The American stand-up, pictured above, already has an Amazon Prime special to her name, 2023’s Hijabs Off, and now makes her Edinburgh Fringe debut covering being charitable on dates, owning a gun but refusing to kill and her ‘toxic trait’: optimism. You might also know her for playing Aleesha on Upload.  Greg Daniels’s Prime Video series about humans uploading themselves to a virtual afterlife.

Pleasance Courtyard, 6.40pm

6. Yvonne Hughes: Absolutely Riddled

That’s the Zs, now the Ys. In this stand-up show about the reality of living with cystic fibrosis, fifty something comedian Yvonne Hughes promises a ‘a candour rarely found in glossy publications’… which may include talk of mucus. She found a new lease of life after going on a drug called Kaftrio, saying: ‘I’ve gone from barely surviving to thriving’ – way beyond the life expectancy she had been told to expect – and it was that which prompted her to take up comedy.

Gilded Balloon Patter House, 11.30am, July 30 to August 15

7. Yukata Cowboy – Stranger in Strangeland

Atsushi Ogata was a class clown in his native Japan, but grew up in the US  (where he was educated at Harvard) and now lives around Europe as a filmmaker, actor and artist. He says that being the constant outsider sometimes means becoming a ‘Zelig-like chameleon character morphing into a local’ and other times standing out for looking so ‘different’

Just The Tonic Legends, 5.20pm.

8. Yer Ma's a Rocket: Sophie Rose McCabe

Edinburgh-born mum Sophie Rose McCabe – a previous finalist in the content creator category of the Funny Women Awards –  combines stand-up, sketches, characters, stories and even rap to cover modern parenting, mental health and more. 

Gilded Balloon at Appleton Tower, 4.20pm

9 WOW! That's What I Call Puns!

A Ronseal of a title for Iain MacDonald’s hour-long onslaught of puns based on musical artists down the decades. It’s one of three wordplay-based shows the Scottish comedian is performing this festival, with the geographically inclined Around the World in 80 Puns at Laughing Horse @ Bar 50 at 11.45am and the comedy gameshow Punchline Bingo at Laughing Horse @ West Port Oracle at 3.45pm.

Laughing Horse @ Bar 50, 6.15pm

10. Woody Fu: One Man John Wick

The New York based actor and improviser has performed with Boom Chicago in Amsterdam, with Fringe stalwarts Baby Wants Candy, and as part of the cast of Thrones! The Musical Parody. Now he’s back with a scripted show, playing Keanu Reeves recruiting the audience to help him make the most violent movie ever. ‘It’s a fun, dumb, interactive and physical homage to the John Wick films,’ he’s said, ‘though you don’t need to have seen them to enjoy the show.’

Assembly George Square Gardens, 8.50pm

Published: 10 Jul 2025