“I officially declared the Fringe over about half an hour ago,” Sam Nicoresti informs me after mentioning last night’s dreams of the Fringe. “And I slept for nine hours for the first time in five weeks, so something has been crossed,” they continue.
And what that “something” is? “Hell.”
When we chat it’s been nearly a week since Sam (she/they) won the prestigious Best Comedy Show award at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards that closed the Edinburgh Fringe. In winning with her show, Baby Doomer, Sam became the first comic who is trans (“an important distinction” we get to later) to win the award previously attained by Hannah Gadsby, Richard Gadd, and Stephen Fry among others.
“Bloody hell. Time moves on, doesn’t it?,” Sam remarks with a sense of genuine shock in regard to the passage of time. “I’m a little tired,” she confirms. Time appears to be irrelevant in the post-Fringe haze. “I’m halfway through a four-day day. I consider the next two days and the two days preceding this to have been one long day,” she prepends. Her partner, off camera, clarifies that “it’s like the days between Christmas and New Years.”
The next big project, besides Baby Doomer‘s September-long run at The Soho Theatre and an upcoming tour, is holy matrimony. When accepting the Best Comedy Show award Sam recalled a joke she made almost a year prior: if she won the award the £10,000 prize could be used for their nuptials. “I would be in such trouble if I were to claim that were a joke,” chortles Sam now.
But plans are in motion as the cork boards formerly used to plot out Baby Doomer have been divested of that and replaced with a single card (at the time of writing) that reads: ‘Wedding’. “We’ve made quite a good intro with the pre-show playlist,” I’m told by Sam, who adds: “I’m struggling to get out of show mode with it. I’ve been talking about the song that we come down the aisle to as ‘walk on music’.”
Would the couple follow in Awkward Productions’ footsteps and marry onstage at the Fringe? “I saw pictures, it looked fabulous and insane. But yeah, I think we’ll have a normal wedding,” posits Sam. Though, Edinburgh during the Fringe may still happen as “all of our friends are already there.”
Compared to Sam’s past Fringe experiences, Baby Doomer was a fully realised show when it arrived. “The Fringe should be a sandbox. It should be a place where people can experiment and do shows that are still finding their feet,” the comedian maintains recalling previous work they’ve exhibited. But they worry that with escalating accommodation and publicity costs people (mostly from working-class backgrounds) are being shut out. Had Sam not had funding they wouldn’t have made it up this year. Not everyone is so lucky. “I can’t afford to come up and have fun. I came up to work for a month.” And against the odds and expectations (including Sam’s) “the career benefits have paid off.” But the world’s biggest arts festival is feeling less accessible and more competitive, Sam argues. The Fringe should not be, “these Highlander-style games where there can only be one at the end.”
Sam also attributes this year’s success, in part, to the virality their special Wokeflake enjoyed after being released online. It did well at the Fringe in 2022 but it wasn’t until clips gained traction online that Sam felt they were taken seriously by the industry at large. “I think social media has sidestepped gatekeepers in that you can access your audience directly. It’s introduced me to a queer crowd that I don’t think I ever could have reached,” they opine. And whereas Wokeflake was about explaining the trans experience to “a comedy crowd,” Baby Doomer is more for the queers and everyone else is also welcome. “I want trans people to feel like they’re being seen and shit like that,” Sam says.
As for how much of herself the comedian puts into her work, Sam staves off the notion that Baby Doomer is all about her. “There’s not really much of me in it. It’s all based in truth. I try and only share things if I think other people might relate to them, you know? Comedy is about trying to do something that feels confessional, but actually is as much about the audience as it is about you.”
Baby Doomer would have been a slightly different show were it not for the UK Supreme Court’s ruling on the legal definition of a ‘woman’ in April. It provided a lot of framing for what she was already discussing, including one scene involving a sartorial emergency in a TK Maxx fitting room. “Pre-Supreme Court that might have been like less politically charged,” Sam reflects. “You look at it now and you can’t escape the context of that. So, it informed where that routine went and what it could say.”
We live in a world that likes to pigeonhole everyone. Queer performers are only capable of making ‘queer art,’ not ‘art’. Similarly, Sam resists the label, “trans comedian.” She reasons, “I’m a comedian and being trans is, I guess, part of how you would describe me.” As with any of us, we are more than our sexuality or gender identities, they form a part of us but not the entirety.
With this in mind, I wonder if Sam, as a performer who is trans and queer, feels a pressure to keep those elements at the centre of her work. “I feel no pressure towards it,” I feel is the god’s honest truth. “I’ll just continue to do whatever I want, really. But maybe that is quite queer.”
Sam Nicoresti is performing Baby Doomer at The Soho Theatre from Wednesday 3 to Saturday 27 September. For tickets and information on Sam’s upcoming tour, visit here.
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