The author is a working stand-up comedian of five years' experience - for this article, they will remain nameless (although all the clues are there). This article was written in the final week of EdFringe 2025.
There is a spreadsheet on my laptop called EDINBURGH_2025_FINAL_v9_ACTUAL.xlsx, and I would rather show you my dating history than open it up and show you.
It contains the full accounting of the worst financial decision I make every year on purpose. Venue guarantee. Registration fee. Out of Hand. Flyers. A PR woman who is probably the worst person I've ever met and costs £3,000 for 'not guaranteed results and no reputation management', and who I suspect is lovely to her forty other acts who she seems to spend far more time working for. And the big one, the line that makes my stomach drop every time I think of it: accommodation. One month. One single bed in a student hall that smells of Febreze, Buckfast and despair, with a shared kitchen where an Acapella group from Birmingham keeps their labelled soup. £1,600. Sixteen-hundred-pounds. My mortgage, for the same period, on an actual home containing my actual life, wife and child, is a third of that.
Nobody made me do this. That's the thing I keep coming back to. Often slightly drunk at 3am. This is my choice.
The Fringe is "open access," which is a beautiful idea. Or at least on paper. But like most beautiful ideas it has been monetised by people who saw an opportunity that was never theirs to take. To take advantage in the guise of support and who never have to stand on the Royal Mile in the rain handing a damp flyer to a man who says, without breaking stride, "no thanks, I hate comedy", or "are you like that Michael McIntyre?".
A monopolistic environment, worsened by Edinburgh Council, where the person taking the most risk gets the least reward.
Let me tell you what a day actually looks like, because when I tell civilians I'm "doing Edinburgh" they picture something between a holiday and a coronation.
I wake at nine in my single bed, having slept badly because the group of 20 year olds in the room above got in at 4am and one of them was loudly shouting about a man called Dean.
I check my ticket sales before I check the weather, before I am fully conscious, thumb finding the app like a smoker finding the packet. Seven sold. Seven. The room holds sixty. I do the maths I have promised myself I will stop doing: seven times ticket price, minus venue split, equals a number that would not cover the Febreze room.
Then I go flyering. Two hours, minimum, every day. I stand in a high street's worth of other people's dreams — a musical about Brexit, a man dressed as a gorilla who sits in a chair for an hour and writes no actual material, three separate one-woman Fleabags, and some of the best and worst stand up in the World. And I perform enthusiasm for my own show to strangers until my face, my feet aches, my back aches.
This is the part no one warns you about: the show is one hour, but the selling of the show is a nine-hour shift, and you are the product, the sales team, the accounts department and often the box office manager.
My show starts later than most people finish their days work. I leave the flat by 11am, grafting all day, and then I don't leave the theatre (a strong, loose use of the word) until 8pm. No rest. Same tomorrow. Relentless.
I have no management. When people ask who my agent is, I tell them to email "Katy, but she on annual leave right now". Katy is a fake name, for a fake manager who handles my diary and emails. Katy is me. There has never been representation. There is only me, a Gmail account, and version nine of the spreadsheet.
After five I do my tech check, which is me and a nineteen-year-old 'sound engineer' called Fraser who is doing eleven shows a day and has the eyes of a man who has seen things. 3 weeks ago he was working at Tesco. There is nothing wrong with Tesco, but it isn't a transferrable skill to someone who needs to programme lights and sound and not miss a single cue. Which explains why he does. Every. Single. Day.
At six I stand in a converted black box room, I have no idea what it functions as the other eleven months of the year - and I do the thing I came here to do, the thing I love more than I have ever loved anything, for an audience of, tonight, eleven people, two of whom are reviewers, possibly, or possibly just men who don't laugh or competitors coming to check out how well or badly I'm doing.
And here is the humiliating truth: for that hour, it is worth it. Or at least I've convinced myself it is. That spike of adrenalin and dopamine. Every penny. The hour is the only part of my life where I know exactly who I am. Then the lights come up and I am a stood holding a bucket by the door and smiling politely and people who awkwardly smile at me as they're walking out without contributing to a show they've just watched, usually enjoyed, and took a year of my life to create.
I cried on the fourth of the month, and then, to be honest, every day after that.
I want to be honest about that, because everyone up here is performing being fine with the same commitment they perform everything else. It wasn't a bad gig that did it. It was a good one, a genuinely lovely Tuesday show, big laughs, a woman in the front row who laughed so hard she had to take her glasses off - followed by checking my phone and seeing that a comic I started with, a comic I have died alongside in the backrooms of a hundred pubs, had sold out his entire run and been longlisted for the award. An award system that I don't know if it's built on connections, better PR, nepotism, sheer luck or meritocracy. It's an uncompletable feedback loop as I turn the scenarios over in my head. Am I being gate kept? Or am I just so much shitter than I think I am?
Is the system rigged, based on luck, or am I just delusional?
And I sat on the steps outside my venue, still clammy and holding the bucket with one note, a few coppers, a few pounds and a bottle top, and I cried out of a feeling I couldn't name because it was jealousy and love and grief and terror all wearing the same coat. He deserves it. That's the worst part. Everyone here deserves it. There isn't enough "it" to go round.
Here's what I'd want a select committee to understand, if a select committee ever asked someone like me, which it won't: the Fringe is a machine into which working comedians pour money we do not have, and out of which the venue, the landlord, the flyer printer, the PR industry and the city of Edinburgh all draw their. Everyone in the supply chain gets paid except the person the audience actually decided to see. We accept this because the Fringe is the shop window, and if you're not in the window you don't exist, or so we're sold. And so every August a few thousand of us pay handsomely for the privilege of maybe being noticed. Getting ourselves into £10,000 of debt to perform an hour of material to eleven people. It is a lottery where the tickets costs more than a car and the prize is a meeting or alcoholism.
And yet.
Last night, walking home at 2am through streets the colour of wet slate, stood next to a Crepe van that doesn't ever seem to close, a couple stopped me. They'd seen the show on Wednesday. The woman quoted a line back at me: my line, a thing I wrote alone in my kitchen in my pants in February - and she laughed again just saying it, and her partner said, "honestly, best thing we've seen," and then they were gone, back into the dark, carrying something I made.
Then I went back to my single bed, I opened the spreadsheet, and I looked at the number at the bottom, the red one, the one that means beans until Christmas and no, actually, I can't come to the wedding.
And God help me, I started a new tab. EDINBURGH_2026_v1. It's an abusive relationship, one where I love them but they don't always love them back. And like any abusive relationship, it's hard for me to pull myself away. Because remember that Saturday night in 2017 where everything felt perfect, and what if I give up my chance for happiness and they give it to someone else.
Why do I believe Edinburgh remains my road to Damascus? Am I as delusional as the people who think Britain's Got Talent will turn them into a household name? Or am I a gambler on a slot machine, knowing it'll only ever pay out 7% of what is put in, but hoping I'm lucky enough to find myself in that 7%.
Diagnose that, if you like. I'd only argue with the prognosis. Because the sickness and the cure are the same thing here, and both of them are an hour long, and one of these Augusts. I still believe this, I have to believe this. I will make it.
And so maybe, in future, people handing out flyerers will be asked: "are you like that NAME REDACTED?"
The Secret Comedian is appearing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Obviously they can't tell you where.
