There’s a reason the ‘funniest joke at the Edinburgh Fringe’ won’t make you laugh

There are a lot of comedians at the Edinburgh Fringe. Some good, many OK, some just getting a pity titter from their friends who’ve come up for the weekend to see their show in a converted public lavatory off-off-off the Royal Mile. And of all the jokes at the festival, Mark Simmons’s was declared the funniest.

“I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it.” Perhaps you had to be there.

The competition, run by TV channel U&Dave, has been running for several years, and those voting for it clearly like their jokes very punny, as most of the finalists fall into this category. Simmons’s website describes him as “an exceptional one-liner comedian”, and he’s hugely successful and multi-award-winning.

He’s that good that he actually had two jokes in the top 15 list, the other being: “I love the Olympics. My friend and I invented a new type of relay baton. Well, he came up with the idea, I ran with it.”

The problem with selecting puns like this for an award is that, while it gives the comics in the list some valuable publicity, it really doesn’t do them justice.

Reading them off the page reminds you of TikTok reels where young blokes rattle off their best dad jokes of varying quality, or being in the presence of a six-year-old who’s just developed a real sense of humour and is wearing you down with their small repertoire of old chestnuts, or self-penned material like: “What do you call a peeled banana? A YELLOW!!!!” Oh, my aching sides.

It’s hard to sum up a comic in just one joke, but necessary for PR purposes; people would get bored of reading, say, one of Stewart Lee’s complex routines off the page. But the big problem with stand-up is that it’s all in the delivery.

Billy Connolly once described the nature of the medium best while rounding up a show: “As you go home tonight, you meet these people, and they say ‘Hey, how is it going?’, and you say: ‘Oh, I laughed, laughed… f***, I laughed.’ ‘Really, that’s great. What did he say?’ ‘I can’t remember.’”

A joke, he added, “is like Chinese food, you know – it kind of goes away quickly”.

To me, that brilliantly sums up the nature of stand-up; you really have to be there to enjoy the whole experience of the jokes and the personality of the comic. If you have a good time (and especially if you have a bad one), you probably won’t remember any of a comedian’s wisecracks, maybe just a few lines. I can still see Zoe Lyons miming playing the “wine bagpipes” to get the last out of a box of booze, and remember one bit of Dave Spikey’s routine about going parachuting and noticing that the slightly clapped-out plane had wallpaper on the inside. The actual jokes? Not at all.

I’ve had experience of doing stand-up myself. I gave up after a handful of gigs because the whole experience was absolutely petrifying, writing material was really hard, but mainly because I wasn’t that great at it. I did get laughs (I still smirk at my routine about adopting zoo animals), but one of the best moments of my brief career was when someone in my first audience said: “You looked like you belonged on stage.” Just not enough to continue, though.

My advice is to go and support live comedy venues and the acts who play there, rather than wearily roll your eyes as you read their puns off the page.