Fringe with benefits: Why Americans flock to Scotland to discover the next big thing

Ian Lockwood was trying to get his comedy act to catch fire. So, in August, he got on a plane to Scotland. 

Lockwood, a 31-year-old comedian based in New York City, had never been to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe before, but after a friend had success at the event last year, he decided to try it. He took his debut show, ironically titled “The Farewell Tour,” on the road. Lockwood’s over-the-top, absurd and characterful musical comedy had found plenty of fans in Brooklyn, but like many alternative comedians, he was finding it hard to compete with the dominance of the traditional stand-up and club scene of Manhattan. 

“The Fringe was a chance to get my work in front of tons of new people and get reviewed by publications that would judge the show on its merits,” he said, pointing out that the Fringe’s traditional publicity infrastructure of starred reviews, which can be stuck up on a poster or advertised in a press release, has no equivalent in the US comedy scene. 

In Edinburgh, Lockwood played every night for four weeks in a row, sometimes to empty rooms and sometimes to packed audiences. By the end, he’d come away with a bevy of 4-, 4.5-, and 5-star reviews from various publications, as well as the Comedian’s Choice Award for Best Newcomer. 

He mainly hung out with other Americans, who had all made the trip for the same reason: the meritocracy of the Fringe, where the sheer length of the festival and commitment from audience and industry members to seeing as many shows as possible meant that even without expensive PR, the best shows would rise to the top by the end through word of mouth. 

The Fringe has long been a proving ground for European entertainers, especially British comedians. But with streaming services pulling back on original content, Hollywood in crisis, and the US entertainment scene as a whole seemingly getting harder to break into, more and more Americans are turning to the Fringe as a way to get noticed. US comedians including Doctor Brown, Natalie Palamides, and Catherine Cohen have all been past winners of the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards, for Best Show and Best Newcomer. 

The Fringe Society, the nonprofit organization that runs the Fringe’s infrastructure and programming, reported that across both comedy and drama sections of the program, 704 American acts were registered this year, a huge jump from 365 in 2023 and up from 267 in 2019, before the pandemic hit.

That has in turn meant an influx of American executives to the festival, seeking the best talent from not only the UK but their own shores, too. Why go all the way to Edinburgh? For performers, the benefits of the Fringe outweigh the immense costs and efforts associated with a monthlong run.

The Fringe “is a good opportunity for you if you feel like in your local scene, you are doing really well and you are just waiting for opportunities,” Lockwood said. He points out that by taking matters into your own hands and going for a Fringe run, instead of passively waiting to be discovered, your exertions might be rewarded. “If you show up and you do a great job, you’ll get recognized.”

Some of the biggest British crossover hits of the past decade have begun as Fringe shows. Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s “Fleabag” was originally produced as a one-woman play at the Fringe in 2013, before becoming a hit on London stages and then finally a BBC series. “Six,” the comedy musical about the wives of Henry VIII, began as a Cambridge student production at the Fringe in 2017. And “Baby Reindeer,” Richard Gadd’s dark-comedy Netflix hit based on real-life experiences, had its origin in a 2019 show staged at the Fringe. International performers have experienced success from the Fringe as well, most notably the New Zealand duo Flight of the Conchords. 

Many of the American comedians who have found success at the Fringe have been alternative comics who already felt a kinship with the UK’s tradition of character, sketch, and musical comedy, as opposed to the US’s preference for stand-up and improv. 

Catherine Cohen, an American comedian, volunteered for popular sketch group Baby Wants Candy in Edinburgh during college, and had such a good time that knew she wanted to bring their own show to the festival eventually. When she finally did in 2018, it wasn’t so much about furthering her career as it was “all about making the show as good as it could be, becoming a stronger performer and having a good time,” she said via email.

She ended up winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer after a wildly successful run that August. Afterward, she was able to film her award-winning show as a Netflix special, and went on to land roles in the series “Search Party” and “Only Murders in the Building.” 

“After a month in Edinburgh, I felt like a superhero,” she said. “I’m very grateful for every relationship and opportunity that has come from doing the Fringe.” For other Americans aspiring to join the festival as a performer, she recommended that they come for a week just as an audience member the year before, to get a feel for the festival.

For UK acts, the Fringe is something workaday and expected, a chance to casually test new material, whereas the financial and physical commitment for an American act is on a different level. Pulling it off successfully reflects the kind of agency and initiative that executives want to see. 

Maggie Leung is a comedy-development exec for Comcast’s NBC/Peacock who, like Lockwood, headed to the Fringe for the first time this year. NBC sends someone from the comedy team every year. That was a change from her former company, Lionsgate, which didn’t regularly have executives in Edinburgh, focusing instead on North American festivals like Sundance and TIFF. 

Leung was excited to visit during the final week of the festival, when awards buzz pulls in a large number of industry members. She sat in audiences alongside executives from Hulu, Amazon, CBS, and several other American studios, seeking out new acts based on “a combination of word of mouth and critical acclaim.” 

Leung focused mostly on international acts she knew she wouldn’t get a chance to see back in LA, like performers from Australia and India. She also tasted the Fringe’s comedy-drama crossover scene with plays like “Weather Girl,” a breakout hit produced by the UK company behind “Fleabag.”

“Probably every major company should be sending people out there,” Leung said. For American shows looking for specific voices from certain backgrounds for staffing writers’ rooms, the Fringe is an international melting pot of strong perspectives. 

Socially, the Fringe is a unique opportunity for networking, too, where industry folks, performers, and marketing and support personnel for shows big and small all mix and mingle. “The bar hang is what is important to people,” Leung said. It’s at these casual, late-night artist bars after shows that connections are made and deals are sealed — a far more egalitarian environment than Hollywood after-parties. 

The next time she heads to the Fringe, Leung said, she definitely wants to make more of an effort to see American acts flying under her radar instead of the very hyped but far too British comedians that she enjoyed, which she knew she couldn’t do anything with professionally back home in LA. 

The key to the Fringe’s appeal to Americans seems to be the unique way it’s set up, with no equivalent worldwide. Doing shows every night for a full month will, like the Beatles at Hamburg, force a performer to get better, and by the end of the month, the rest of the industry can show up to see polished acts from performers at the height of their power, flying high on word of mouth, hype, and cheap drinks. 

As long as there’s an expectation that the next big thing will emerge from this crucible in Edinburgh, the Fringe will attract people from all over the world trying to be that big thing — and executives trying to find it.

Allegra Rosenberg is a journalist in New York.