The stars of Saturday Night Live UK at the Fringe — the verdict
Paddy Young, Ania Magliano and Larry Dean are all performing at Edinburgh, alongside several of the show’s writing team. Are they any good?

Is it fanciful to call Saturday Night Live UK the surprise hit of the year? On the one hand, it is based on an American show that has been shaping comedy for more than 50 years — talk about a head start. On the other, who expected anything like the confident, unlikely series of sketches that ran on Sky One for eight episodes this spring?
It’s patchy, of course — it’s a sketch show — but it squared the circle between aping the Manhattan original and having a skewwhiff, very British sensibility all its own. All 11 of the cast members from the first series will be back when the second series begins on September 12 (with more episodes due in the new year). Three of them are performing stand-up at the Fringe, with tours to follow, as are six of the writing team of 20, including a solo stand-up debut for the head writer Daran “Jonno” Johnson. Can you spot the spirit of SNL in them? And which of them are worth seeing in the flesh?
The performers

Paddy Young
★★★★☆

Paddy Young is sharply absurd
ALINE DOWNEY
By now Paddy Young has cut his Edinburgh short, gearing himself up for an autumn of more thousand-yard smirks as the co-host of SNL UK’s Weekend Update section. I’m happy to say he goes easier on the smouldering in his gravity-defying second Fringe show. Can you be as handsome as Young and trade as a loser? Can you pause as much as Young does and not lose momentum? Can you drift between mundanity and fantasy and stay coherent?
Somehow you can, or he can anyway. Celebrating and bemoaning his superficiality, the Scarborough-raised thirtysomething dissects his newly single life house-sharing with a high-earning friend whose new relationship is threatening to make him more lodger than flatmate. “Not like SNL, is it?” he jokes, between beatboxing, mock murders of audience members who annoy him, brief descriptions of a real-life accident with a samurai sword and extended descriptions of a more fantastical continental pursuit of his long-lost first love.

Amid the charm offensive, his writing is sharply absurd enough to keep you with him. You can’t say he exactly crams his ideas into the hour but the breathing space is very much part of his ruminatively imaginative appeal.
Touring Nov 3 to Mar 25, berksnest.com

Ania Magliano
★★★☆☆

Ania Magliano keeps her audience amused and intrigued
JASMINE RUPARELIA
Ania Magliano thinks about sex like she thinks about New Year’s Eve: joyful in theory, more testing in practice. So she is out to address her disconnection from her body. And in a pornified world in which one of her classmates had a labiaplasty for her 18th birthday, the challenge is for anyone to have a sound relationship with their own body.

Her three previous shows saw her mixing an easily articulate, gossipy affability with a spirit of intellectual inquiry. This one, Peach Fuzz, is not her best work but still keeps its audience (I saw it pre-Fringe at the Soho Theatre in London) amused and intrigued. And as she segues from talk of Sylvanian Families and Barbie dolls into sexual awakenings, sexual positions and becoming familiar with her nether regions, her banter is less idle than it first appears. She is on-topic from the off.
For the first time, though, the investigation feels a bit shallow. There is a thin line for a confessional comedian between self-exploring and self-involved.
Monkey Barrel, to Aug 30, edfringe.com. Touring to May 7, aniamagliano.com

Larry Dean 
★★★★☆

Larry Dean performs a hugely satisfying, propulsive hour of stand-up
MATT CROCKETT
Larry Dean has the relatable articulacy of a Kevin Bridges mixed with the oddball energy of a Lee Evans — or perhaps that’s overselling him slightly. Yet this Glaswegian comic, who hasn’t cut through on SNL UK like some of the other performers, owns the room in such a consummate way that it makes other Fringe comics look callow.
Why is he dressed in a kind of Elvis outfit? Because he and his partner Mikey first bonded over their love of rock’n’roll. Will their marriage cause any ructions within his Catholic family and his Irish-Iranian extended family? He will have fun with all of that — and his move to London, and how impenetrable even he finds some Scottish accents, and his autism diagnosis, and the time he met King Charles.
Much though his journey from deeply damaged to newly at peace and newly married gives the hour its spine, he remains smilingly serrated enough to turn his gift for mimicry on his nearest and dearest as well as the royals. One or two tangents too many, perhaps. But it’s a hugely satisfying, propulsive hour of stand-up.
Pleasance Courtyard, to Aug 30, pleasance.co.uk. Touring Sep 20 to Feb 6, larrydeancomedy.com

The writers

Chris Cantrill
★★★★☆

Chris Cantrill oozes easy-peasy Bradford charm
REBECCA NEED-MENEAR
Chris Cantrill is such an easy stage presence that he can have as much fun with losing all his stage lighting as he can with gossiping about being one of the writing staff on SNL UK. “Series two starts in September and I need a new roof,” he says.
Yet while he oozes easy-peasy Bradford charm, he assembles his second solo show, Rewilding, with a craftsman’s care. The first one, which got him nominated for an Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2024 following two nods for his and Amy Gledhill’s double act The Delightful Sausage, saw him embracing middle age as he moved to rural Northumberland. This story has him address the pleasures and pains of being 42, only gradually addressing the crisis that rocks his home town when a beloved tree is brutally felled. Whodunnit?
Maybe the emotional stakes are lower this time around but his assurance is even greater, the details even more telling. He uses delectably few words to give you a vivid impression of his vocal-coach wife Nicola, his new best friend Dave, his defiant local friend José Miguel, his divorced mate with a nose ring James. Every anecdote pushes the story forward; none feels forced, much though you come to realise there have been some conceits at play. Delightful indeed.
Monkey Barrel, to Aug 30, edfringe.com

Bella Hull
★★★☆☆

Bella Hull is an enjoyable presence
MICHAEL JULINGS
What an enjoyable presence Bella Hull is. Putting questions to the front row, she steps so far over the line so fast that it’s impossible to take offence: “When was the last time you went to the doctor and what was it for?” Asking questions of her own life, growing up with her mother and grandmother and trying to turn boyfriends into “cucky doormats”, she wonders if she needs more of the masculine in her life.
I mention the presence more than the material because the former feels full-formed and the latter feels sketchy: would this (barely) 50-minute lunchtime show be more evolved if she’d had more time, if she hadn’t been writing for SNL UK? It’s a show that fires out more good ideas than it gives itself space to resolve but the writing talent is clear. This, say, on her single life in 2025: “Have you ever not had sex for so long that when you put your phone charger into your phone you feel jealousy?”
Monkey Barrel, to Aug 30, edfringe.com

Ayo Adenekan
★★★☆☆

Ayo Adenekan is always easy company
MATTHEW STRONGE
At 25, Adenekan is the youngest writer on SNL UK, and the only Scottish one. The set-ups are too long-winded in his second Fringe show but he’s always easy company as he takes us through his Muslim Nigerian parents’ divorce, and his own coming out as bisexual and nonobservant — his last big job was working for three years at a local pulled-pork restaurant.
One of the best jokes revolves around him seeing his estranged dad at last year’s show, but otherwise his stories about his family and friends and lovers are affably tentative. Sometimes, as in a brilliant Meghan Markle line or a great gag about the SNL UKperformer Ayoade Bamgboye, he shows what a sharp writer he can be. It all needs to go up a gear or two but the promise is real.
Monkey Barrel, to Aug 30, edfringe.com

Jonno
★★★★☆

Jonno performs with a winning lightness
CLAIRE HAIGH 2023
The SNL UK head writer Daran Johnson trades under the nickname most people know him by in his belated solo Fringe debut, aged 38. You get a good idea of why the show has a skewwhiff sensibility that is hard to second guess from an opening number (Jonno is a mighty fine singer) about sticking your hand up a camel’s bottom. He tells us about the reaction of his ex (“Why have you done that?”) and his defence: it’s just funny.
For good and for ill Jonno throws a bit of everything at us here: there is a “stool of sincerity”, when he talks about his anxiety, his fainting, his “avoidant” behaviour in relationships, the way he both wants the acting success of his friends from the sketch trio Sheeps (Liam Williams, Al Roberts), of which he is part, and refuses to audition for anything for fear of rejection. There is no shortage of good ideas, deployed with winning lightness, even if sometimes you have to find your own way to where Jonno is coming from. It’s no accident that the funniest and most wowingly impressive routine is a series of his own version of Bond themes: an idiosyncratic, virtuosic reaction to a reference point almost universally shared.
Monkey Barrel, to Aug 29 (not 17), edfringe.com

Omar Badawy
★★★☆☆

Omar Badawy is an original thinker with a high gag rate
MATT STRONGE
What an assured debut from Badawy, who tells his story as the Cambridge-raised son of Egyptian parents through the prism of the time he got caught up in Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom march in London last September. Does he sometimes spend so long flashing back from that to the schooldays where he was unwittingly marked out as a spokesman for all things Muslim, to meeting and going out with the only Arabian girl at his university, that the structural device starts to strain? Yes. But Badawy is an original thinker with a high gag rate and emotional intelligence too. He could go far.
Pleasance Courtyard, to Aug 28, pleasance.co.uk

Celya AB
★★☆☆☆

Ceyla AB has bright bits of writing

French-Algerian by birth, resident in Britain for 12 years, Celya AB admits at the start of her latest Fringe hour that she’s put it together in a bit of a hurry. “I’ve written this show in eight weeks. I was working on a little show called Saturday Night Live UK.” Hopefully she can make this series of reflections on sex, love, immigration and desire bloom by the time she takes it on tour in the autumn but for now the smilingly doleful delivery rather sucks the life out of some bright-enough bits of writing.
She talks about going into therapy, about “pretty regular suicidal ideation”, about losing her virginity, about thinking too much to get to sleep at night, about the broad way even her most liberal friends tease her for her Frenchness, about wanting a baby. It feels like a promising series of set-ups that rather peter out. Her musings on whether doing stand-up is healthy for her or not feel too navel-gazing to be involving.
Monkey Barrel, to Aug 30, edfringe.com, touring Sep 12 to Nov 1, celya-ab.com

‘Saturday Night Live’ U.K. Stars Get a Hero’s Welcome at the Edinburgh Fringe

As comics like Ania Magliano return to the festival for the first time since the show became a surprise hit, audiences are pouring in to catch them.

Ania Magliano, a breakout star of Britain’s “Saturday Night Live,” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe on Sunday.Credit...Jaime Molina for The New York Times

By Jillian Rayfield

Reporting from Edinburgh

Aug. 11, 2026

Ania Magliano was sitting beside her “Weekend Update” co-host, Paddy Young, at his birthday party not long ago — in the same formation they use on Britain’s “Saturday Night Live” — when a few people stopped and asked for photos.

“I was like: Maybe we shouldn’t be sitting literally like we’re in ‘Weekend Update,’” she said in a recent interview, adding that there was “definitely an uptick” in people recognizing her since the show became a surprise hit this spring.

Magliano, one of the several comedians to get an overnight career boost from the show, is one of its breakout stars. Now, she and a number of others from the cast and writing team are performing at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, many of them festival veterans returning in something of a victory lap.

Magliano, 28, from Buckinghamshire, England, said she wasn’t necessarily getting recognized on the streets of Edinburgh, where the Fringe runs through Aug. 31. But her stand-up comedy show — “Peach Fuzz,” in which she likens Winston Churchill to a Gen Z girl and describes a transformative trip to a sensory deprivation chamber — sold out its run weeks before the festival started on Friday.

Magliano performing at Monkey Barrel Comedy in Edinburgh. Her show “Peach Fuzz” sold out its run weeks before the festival started.

She said that so far the biggest difference was the enthusiasm of the Edinburgh audiences, who “are really up for it.” At one show, two people in the front row were wearing homemade “Weekend Update” T-shirts featuring her face alongside Young’s.

Magliano began attending the Fringe at 18, initially working as a receptionist and seeing stand-up shows. She said she packed in so much that she would sometimes sleep for just an hour a night, and then take naps on a bathroom floor.

The glut of comedy made her want to start doing stand-up herself, so she started gigging and eventually returned to Edinburgh to perform. Yet while she’s had successful runs at the Fringe before, lifted by her appearances on the popular British comedy game show “Taskmaster,” “S.N.L.” has taken things to a different level.

“Weekend Update” clips in particular have had wide reach on social media, including edgy jokes about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (the disgraced former Prince Andrew) and one about Mark Zuckerberg and Hitler’s bunker that generated some outrage.

“I was definitely surprised by the scale of the response,” said Magliano, who pointed to being recognized by the comedian Graham Norton after bumping into him in the TV studio, and having an “S.N.L.” sketch retweeted by President Trump, as moments that made her realize how big it was.

The festival can often be a dog-eat-dog experience for performers, who face high costs and intense competition from thousands of others trying to draw in the audiences who flock to Edinburgh throughout August. But Britain’s “S.N.L.,” which returns for a second season in September, has given tailwinds to cast members like Young, of “Weekend Update,” who has also sold out most of his Fringe run, and Larry Dean, a stand-up comedian from Glasgow.

Dean, 36, first performed at the Fringe a decade ago, passing out fliers for a show in exchange for 10 minutes of stage time. This year, he’s performing a show called “Hellbent,” which is then scheduled to tour Britain.

“Before ‘S.N.L.,’” he said, “it was literally just: tour, Fringe, tour, Fringe. It was just nothing but stand-up,” and he hadn’t done much sketch comedy. But now he gets recognized for his King Charles III or Louis Theroux impersonations on the show — though “I don’t get much love for my Peter Mandelson,” he said, referring to Britain’s former ambassador the U.S. who was fired for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Dean said he wasn’t surprised that “S.N.L.” was a hit, despite the naysayers beforehand: “British people are just so used to being disappointed that we now just have low expectations for everything.”

For him, that’s extended to his lifestyle at the Fringe, where pricey accommodation often leads performers to stay in grimy places. A past apartment had mice and, he thinks, a flying cockroach. This year, he’s staying in student housing. “God knows what’s happened in that room before I got there,” he said.

Yet for most performers at the Fringe, the struggles are worth the potential exposure.

Ayo Adenekan, 25, a stand-up from Edinburgh who is a writer for Britain’s “S.N.L.,” said the festival was now a place for comedians to be scouted for the show: He was first approached after the showrunner came to see his first solo hour at last year’s festival.

A common refrain, said Adenekan, whose show “Homeland Insecurity” has sold out most of the festival’s first two weeks, is that “the ideal story” is that of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose career began at the festival with “Fleabag.” But with “S.N.L.,” he said, “there’s another pipeline there. There is somewhere to go post-Fringe.”

For Magliano, who will take “Peach Fuzz” on tour in Britain and the United States in November, being back at the Fringe is as much “Stockholm syndrome” as a return to “my roots.”

But she couldn’t envision a scenario in which fame would stop her from coming back — unless, she joked, “I’m in back-to-back Marvel films.”

Join us to celebrate the end of SNL UK’s first-ever series, with Jake Bhardwaj and cast auctioning fashion, props and memorabilia for Keep it Fringe Fund.