The Edinburgh Fringe hates women, Jews, and free speech

This year's Edinburgh Festival was a celebration of mediocrity and censorship

Abusive misogynist Sam Nicoresti

Smug selfies taken by trans-identified men in the women’s toilets are a sight that anyone with an internet connection is familiar with, but a particularly egregious instance of it occurred last week on Instagram.

Stand-up comedian Sam Nicoresti triumphantly posted a picture of himself holding his shiny new Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show while sitting on a toilet that is clearly in the women’s block, as evidenced by the sanitary bin next to him, which is there for women to dispose of used sanitary products. His face is fixed with a smug smile, a fine example of duper’s delight, his middle finger stuck up towards the camera, and the caption reads “This is my gender recognition certificate 💋”. (The lipstick mark emoji proving his womanliness).

The prize in his enormous blokey hands is a huge accolade; it has launched plenty of other comedians, including Lee Evans, The League of Gentlemen, and Hannah Gadsby. So it feels deeply depressing to those of us who have been fighting the gender wars for years that the biggest prize in comedy (judged by people including a Hat Trick Productions executive, two BBC producers, and arts writers at The Guardian and Telegraph) has been given to a man who wasted no time at all in sending a big ‘fuck you’ to the largest number of women possible.

Tellingly, the quote he gave to the press about his win ended with the words “it’s a privilege to share this moment with the first all-female line-up of award winners.” You can almost see his lips curl around his teeth in a smirk as he positions himself, a white male, on a level playing field with Ayoade Bamgboye, the black, immigrant, female winner of Best Newcomer. One can easily picture Sam and his badly-dressed comedy scene mates laughing and egging him on to force every arts and culture journalist in the country to print his false claims about his sex, lest they end up on the village ducking stool (because the censorship is in his interest, Nicoresti insists censorship is not present in the comedy world).

There’s no question that Nicoresti despises women and takes great delight in appropriating our words and identities. Revealingly, a line from one of his previous shows stated “If [TERFs] care so much about guarding women, why do they only talk about doing it in the Wagamama loos? Never in the streets or their jobs or on the buses or in their homes…It is using violence against women to perpetuate further violence against women.” Clearly, the tireless work by the women at organisations such as Beira’s Place, Women’s Aid, Rape Crisis, Refuge, Southall Black Sisters, Imkaan, Nordic Model Now, FILIA, and The Survivor’s Trust, to name but a few, have escaped the notice of Nicoresti, presumably as he’s too busy chiding TK Maxx shop assistants for misgendering him in the women’s changing room.

Nicoresti is not unique among Edinburgh Fringe performers in his open hatred of women. Previous award nominee Jordan Gray, who took his dick out on channel 4, was performing again for the first time since his 2022, and was lauded by the great and good as being unmissable with a similar show to Nicoresti’s (including wishing he had a use for tampons. Ha ha. Groundbreaking stuff. Everyone clap, please. If you don’t clap you must be a far-right Nazi bigot!).

One wonders when the public will tire of hearing men with floppy little moobs whine about not being accepted by natal women, but we must hope the award judges will decide when we’ve had enough and go back to rewarding actual comedy again.

Few in the arts world drew attention to the literal cancellation of several Jewish comedians before the festival even began; comedians whose only crime was their ethnicity. At the start of the Fringe, the only remnant of the deplatformed comic Rachel Creeger’s show ‘Ultimate Jewish Mother’ was a foamex board on a lamppost on Leith St on which some righteous soul had scribbled in Sharpie ‘CANCELLED FOR BEING JEWISH’. She was fortunately offered alternate spaces to perform the show, only for the listing board outside the venue to have the word 'Jewish’ burnt out. Still, the winner of the festival has claimed that there is no such thing as cancellation so perhaps Creeger shouldn’t complain?

Elsewhere at the festival, the aptly-named show ‘Delusional - I Killed a Man’ featured a man swinging around on a piece of fabric, lamenting that he had killed his old self by ‘becoming a woman’ but graciously offered us all the chance to ‘mourn him’ at this hour long ‘funeral’, (5 stars - Broadway Baby & A Youngish Perspective). Please kill me too, sir, to spare me this nonsense.

The theatre scene wasn’t much better. I was handed a flyer for a play by recent graduates of the University of Bristol entitled ‘Rodney Black: Who Cares? It’s Working’ which explores what happens ‘when stand-up comedians go too far’. I went in hoping for an even-handed look at free speech in the arts world, but was presented with the laziest caricature of a male standup comedian who sneers about ‘the trans agenda’ and then inadvertently causes the rape and murder of a female audience member. Now, gee, what do you think the message is there?

Rodney’s jokes are taken too literally by a deranged fan who carries out the attack after one of his gigs and his slimy, mercurial agent (who despises Stewart Lee) leaps to turn him into a free speech warrior. It was a wasted opportunity to explore the horrors of being an artist in 2025. Far easier to claim that gross dudes making shitty jokes are the ones responsible for all the world’s ills, rather than the nice, award-laden blokes who wear skirts and lipstick. The play might as well be called ‘Free Speech is Literal Murder’.

‘Rodney Black: Who Cares? It’s Working’ received the Alpine Fellowship Theatre Prize in 2024 and the Bitesize festival Best Writing Award in 2025. It was shortlisted for the Popcorn Writing Award in 2025 and is soon to begin a London run at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney. The play received a £2500 Keep It Fringe bursary to support its production, as did Nicoresti. That’s a whole system in place to spread false consensus propaganda.

Now that Fringe is over for another year, and having received a barrage of comments on his toilet selfie telling him to stay out of women’s spaces, Nicoresti now predictably claims to be avoiding social media (on Instagram, ironically) because he is “currently 'being discussed' online by some of the most crinkled people you've ever seen” (hi Sam!), and ends his post somewhat arbitrarily with the words “Trans rights are human rights and free Palestine 🏳️‍⚧️ 🇵🇸”.

Right.

My favourite quote from Nicoresti’s award-winning show is “I don’t know what it means to be a woman but I’m fucking nailing being trans.” Having surveyed the mountain of evidence of his aggressive hatred of women and self-satisfied narcissism, I couldn’t agree more.