Chortle Student Comedy Award 2026

Edinburgh Fringe comedy review

She's definitely the first Scottish winner of the Chortle Student Comedy Award, but Eva Peroni may also be the first comic to already be making their Fringe debut in a Big Four venue in the same year as their final.

The Edinburgh University law student is already pretty established on the Scottish comedy circuit, and the gig miles she had under her belt surely helped her secure the win. She took to the stage with the easy confidence of a pro club comedian, with a keen sense of mischief, but measured and controlled.

'Mature beyond her years' applies to her material too. She looks back on her time being sent to Costa Rica because her parents thought she’d become too wayward a drug-user – which is very much the ‘caught with a fag so smoke the whole packet’ school of parenting. This happened when she was 17, which she makes seem like a lifetime ago, but she’s only 22 now.

Her set covered growing up in the working-class town of Livingston, obscure university degrees, and even the water consumption of AI data centres, mixing winningly flippant observation with out-and-out puns. Peroni jokes that with the state of the employment market, stand-up can now be considered a safe career option. I think she’ll be OK.

For all Peroni is at home on stage, runner-up Adam Ernest Pickard emphasised his awkwardness, performing in a fully zipped-up anorak, while rooted to the spot, his wide eyes probing the audience.

It befits his style as a writer of quirky one-liners, sometimes based in reality – such as the worrying slogans on the Bubbleology chain – but more often describing an offbeat thought experiment, such as defacing Stephen King novels just for the giggles, or coming up with a new business idea inspired by ice-cream vans. He’s in the mould of Milton Jones, where the brief jokes are mini-absurdities, rather than always reaching immediately for wordplay, and the better for it.

After compere Mark Watson’s intro, Isaac Tompkinson had the task of opening the show – and also proved himself to be a very useful writer. Performed with a slight standoffishness, in keeping with his privileged accent, the material is, however, sillier than the presentation would suggest. The culmination of the routine that starts from ventriloquism probably isn’t worth the journey, but more generally he’s good at stringing the audience along a line of thought before taking a turn to an odd payoff. You shouldn’t always trust a man with a posh voice…

Next, Will Finney, whose flipboard-based routine is an all-or-nothing gamble. If the audience don’t get on board with his approach – showing statistical visualisations such as pie-charts and line graphs and pretending they’re actually drawings of something else – it may be a long seven minutes. As such, he might be advised to mix things up a bit to take best advantage of his endearingly self-conscious nerdiness.

Then a change in style, thanks to the highly composed Fran Best, whose dulcet Geordie accent gently draws the audience into her world. The soft charm is deceptive, however, as her opening gag is at the expense of an ugly baby and the linchpin routine revolves around a uterus operation – an amusingly humiliating anecdote from her medical studies. The story could be – well, is – gross, but Best delivers it as winsomely as a CBeebies Bedtime Story. She must have a great bedside manner…

While Best lulls you into a false sense of security, Kathy Rivett slaps you out of it. Dashing manically around the stage in her party hat, vivid green shirt, and oversize ties, she jabbers away just as urgently. She definitely brings a lot of unhinged energy to the room.

‘I’ve just been diagnosed,’ she says in her mania. ‘Guess which one?’ And the audience is not short of suggestions. She has some good short gags, while some of the more offbeat ideas require a leap of faith, which the audience can be hesitant to take. But you absolutely cannot fault the superhuman effort she puts into getting it over the line. Rivett says she wants a review to flip a cliché and state: ‘She makes it look hard.’ Consider it done.

Another act with a slightly demented full-on style, James Perham looks a bit like Ivo Graham and styles himself somewhere between Sam Campbell and James Acaster. Not at all bad influences to have, but he wears them a little too obviously.

Nonetheless, he’s got some good, odd ideas and his opening Marmite gag, ironically, went down universally well, before spinning out into a more convoluted surrealism. Here, and with a routine about the luge, he probably lost some people as the ideas became increasingly detached from reality, but such is the lot of the cult comedian who commits to the bit.

Student final