So long, pun of the year. The best joke of the fringe award – the lighthearted, groan-inducing staple of the Edinburgh festival – has been scrapped after 17 years. The award’s retirement may not prompt national mourning, but it does bring to an end a curious fringe tradition – one that delivered easy headlines as well as endless debate.
Launched in 2008, the award set out to distil the spirit of the festival into a single one-liner. Longlisted by a panel of critics and then voted on by the public, it aimed to showcase the sharpest bite-size humour from that year’s fringe. Still, the announcement was never without controversy. In 2023, when Lorna Rose Treen took the title with the joke “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah”, she was met with a wave of online criticism (the Sun claimed her win had “killed comedy”). Last year, an article in the Herald deemed the award Edinburgh’s “most heated controversy”.
