Edinburgh Fringe: The viral comedy stars leaping from TikTok to the stage

A number of new comedians amassed huge followings on TikTok during the pandemic. Now some are trying to convert viral fame into on-stage success by performing live at the Edinburgh Fringe.

TikTok has emerged as a major force in comedy, by letting anyone share short, funny videos. The company is even sponsoring Edinburgh's annual comedy festival and hosting a virtual stage this year.

While social media isn't likely to replace stand-up, it has allowed a new generation of budding comedy stars to bypass the traditional routes to make their names.

But can the online sensations cut it in front of a live audience? Here, four of the biggest TikTok comedy acts who are performing at Edinburgh this month talk about becoming viral stars, taking to the stage - and whether the two can exist together.

In the olden days (ie a few years ago), a comedian at Edinburgh would hope to be spotted by an agent or TV producer who might one day be able to help them build a global fanbase. In the age of TikTok, performers like Christian Brighty can do it themselves in a few months.

"I'm going to tour America next year - which is an obscene, ridiculous idea," says Brighty, 28, from Cambridgeshire. "I'm an alternative comic who, in 2019, was doing shows in dingy pub basements where I think Covid began. And I now have enough people to go and take my show to America. That's insane."

Just under half of his 430,000 TikTok followers are in the US, and it's easy to imagine his riotous and knowing parodies of lusty period dramas going down well in the post-Bridgerton era. He joined the platform while furloughed during lockdown, posting a video a day for a month.

"It was a safe enclosed space to be creative, to experiment, to fail," he says. "There are no repercussions for posting a bad video because no-one will see it. But if you post a good one, then millions of people might see it. I learned so much in that time."

His first video to break the million mark was inspired by watching Poldark with his girlfriend's family. He has gone on to establish regular, silly characters - a romantic poet, a highwayman with a hobbyhorse, and a running story that sends up the allure of the archetypal aloof hero.

Forcing himself to make lots of TikToks honed his joke writing and quality control, he says. "And it's made me become a better live performer, without a doubt."

His Edinburgh show Playboy, co-written with Amy Greaves, centres on another alter-ego, Lord Christian Brighty, a cross between Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice and Blackadder's Lord Flashheart.

"You can't just take what you do on TikTok and put it in front of an audience live. It won't work," he says.

"I describe them as siblings because they require different sensibilities. There's stuff in the [live] show that's far too slow for TikTok, because on TikTok you need a joke immediately, it needs a strong visual, and the idea needs to be at the header. Whereas you can't really do that on stage."

The stage show is more fully-formed and is "the more authentic version of me", he says. It was praised by The Telegraph, which said: "An amusing 10-second video doesn't always translate to a good hour in the theatre, but in this case it indisputably has."

Abi Clarke was "very new" to stand-up after spending a year doing low-key shows on the circuit before the pandemic hit. By the time the lockdowns finally ended, she emerged with hundreds of thousands of online fans. She now has 840,000 followers on TikTok and 360,000 on Instagram.

"Before, I was able to be anonymous and if a gig went bad, I'd just disappear and think, no-one's going to remember anyway," she says. "Whereas now, there's more pressure there. Quite often people in the audience do know who you are or have come specifically for you."

Some have even turned up wearing her merch. But on stage, Clarke is still taking things slowly.

She's not doing the standard solo hour-long show at Edinburgh, instead being one of four new comics on the bill at the Pleasance venue's prestigious Comedy Reserve night. "I'm still in training," she says.

"If you see someone with a large social media following, a lot of people think you're the same as the comedians they see on telly. They're like, 'Well, you're a famous comedian'. But no, any comedian you see on TV has probably been going at least six years. And I've been going since 2019, with a two-year pandemic in the middle with no live performing."

She found success online with shrewdly-observed, shareable sketches like If Cats Were Human and If Dogs Were Human, and skits about office gossips Jill and Tracey, and life inside Asos HQ. With their quick edits, multiple characters and maximum running times of a minute, they are very different from her stand-up routine.

"They really don't bleed into each other a lot to be honest. I'd say only twice I've written [live] material and written a sketch about the same thing."

Her live routine is also "a lot ruder", she says. "You get to be a bit naughtier on stage, whereas I think on the internet things can get taken out of context or people who speak different languages don't understand you're joking. So I think you've got to be very wholesome online. You've got to be your chirpy self.

"But on stage I get to show all sides of me, which is really fun because you work to get them [the audience] to like you at the start and then you can see how far you can go without losing them."

When Irish comedian Lee Brophy started posting parodies as a lip-syncing, LGBT-accepting Catholic priest who "puts the bi in Bible", he attracted more than 700,000 followers on TikTok - and reactions ranging from death threats to cries for help from queer teens in strict religious families.

Brophy's Edinburgh stand-up show, titled False Prophet, is about the double-edged impact of becoming known as the TikTok priest - and he will effectively kill off the character at the end of the festival.

"It's been a weird journey," says Brophy, who was also on the stand-up circuit before the pandemic. "I wasn't prepared for any of this. I was just making silly jokes on the internet and trying to get a little bit of feedback from people. And I got a lot of feedback from people."

His broad-minded, fun-loving priest was originally in a TV pilot that Brophy wrote at the start of lockdown. The comedian decided to test the script by posting clips on TikTok.

"The priest was a very minor character to begin with," he explains. "Then I put him up online and he had this progressive point of view that people resonated with, and I was like, oh, there's an appetite for this.

"So I thought, I'll just do that. It became a scenario of me waking up every single morning, putting on what was to me a costume, and sitting in front of my phone by nine o'clock lip-synching to Taylor Swift."

Some didn't get the joke, though. "There are the people who believe I'm a priest and love it. And then there are the people who absolutely detest it, who are like, 'You are leading people to hell'."

His task now, he says, is to "not necessarily erase that part because I'm grateful for all the things that have come out of it - but to [show] I am not that person, give myself the freedom to be a performer again, and to be recognised as a performer and comedian and an artist".

In a five-star review, Edinburgh Guide said it was "so clear that this is just the stepping stone into something so much greater".

So, after his Edinburgh run, he will post a video putting Father Lee out to pasture. "I've been playing along with this because it's been funny to me, but I kind of want my life back now," he says.

Before the pandemic, sisters Chloe and Tabby Tingey had given up on being performers. Chloe, who trained at Berklee College of Music in Boston, was working in digital marketing. Tabby, who went to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, had retrained to teach yoga.

Covid hit, the yoga studio never opened, and the pair moved in together. They dipped their toes into TikTok with weightlifting challenges, strangely. Then, having both been recently dumped, they decided to post a comic song about relationships.

"We thought no-one would see it because nobody followed us at that point," says Tabby, 28. They were wrong, and tens of thousands did see it.

Chloe, 30, continues: "We thought, oh, this is the most views we've ever had in our whole lives, so maybe we should just ride this wave. But it was a huge shock and surprise."

Their videos became more elaborate, and soon attracted millions of views. "To this day, we're still shocked every day when we wake up that we're musical comedians," Chloe adds. "This is very unexpected."

As well as parodies about dating and men, they do hugely popular spoofs of a party-loving Boris Johnson. They usually rewrite the lyrics of pop hits, and now have 400,000 followers.

Their live show Bittersweet, on the other hand, is all made up of their own frank and funny songs, which mostly take aim at manipulative, inadequate and infuriating men - "every second-rate Romeo we've ever known", as one tune puts it.

A couple of songs have appeared both online and on stage, but mostly there's not much crossover. Writing an hour-long stage show was "very different than having these isolated little ideas", Tabby says.

Chloe explains: "It's small little bits on TikTok, and for the live show we've had to really think about the arc of it, and how it all fits together."

It is "difficult to gauge" how many people in the Edinburgh audience are there because of TikTok, Tabby says.

Her sister adds: "Somebody came to our show who had come all the way from Illinois to see us because she's a TikTok fan of ours. That made us really feel an immense gratitude."

The Edinburgh Fringe runs until 29 August.