Hannah Gadsby: ‘The Edinburgh fringe might make your dreams come true – or it will give you scurvy’

Hannah Gadsby: ‘The Edinburgh fringe might make your dreams come true – or it will give you scurvy’

Tooth pain, lost cash and lots of crying – the award-winning comic has had a difficult relationship with the fringe. So why come back for more?

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The first time I took a show to the Edinburgh festival fringe, in 2006, I slept in a closet, performed to fewer than 100 people across my whole time there and got hit by a golf ball in The Meadows. Not a euphemism. I also lost an obscene amount of money and cried thrice in public. That I came runner-up in the fringe’s So You Think You’re Funny? competition doesn’t really factor in my memory list of that year, because success is not what defines the fringe experience. Failure does. Because the fringe might promise to make your showbiz dreams come true, but in reality it is more likely to give you scurvy.

I returned to the fringe with eight shows over the next decade. I wouldn’t say that I experienced much in the way of “success” in that time, but my failure rate remained consistently high. In 2011, I came off my bike and cracked my head open on some cobblestones. Another year I committed to having a healthy fringe and swore off alcohol. I opted instead to prop myself up with an artificially sweetened caffeine product and, as a result, I enjoyed a month’s-long jittering that looked very much like what those in ye olde times would have described as a nervous breakdown.

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