There’s efficiency, then there’s the process that led to Sam Nicoresti winning the most prestigious award in live comedy. “A year ago my girlfriend asked me to marry her,” says Nicoresti on accepting the £10,000 prize last weekend. “[When] we were talking about how to pay for the wedding, I joked and said, ‘It’s easy, I’ll just win the Edinburgh comedy award’.” Can it be true? Is Nicoresti not only the first transgender winner of the so-called Oscars of comedy, but the first ever to manifest victory by force of strategic will?
“It’s amazing what you can do,” she grins, three days after her triumph, “if you set your mind to something.” And that’s what Nicoresti has done in the last 12 months, turning around a niche career in alt-comedy, pointing it towards stardom, and pressing her pedal to the metal. Her winning show Baby Doomer was palpably the set of a comic zeroing in on a mass audience – notwithstanding the hot-potato status of her subject, life as a trans woman, nor her background in leftfield humour with a collective called Weirdos. Nicoresti’s previous biggest hit was a satirical multimedia show with the memorable title Cancel Anti Wokeflake Snow Culture.
The comic, originally from Birmingham, is quitting Edinburgh in a state of exhaustion – and probably still some shock – when we speak. Of the moment when her name was announced and her place confirmed in the ex-Perrier award pantheon (former winners: Steve Coogan, The League of Gentlemen, Bridget Christie and many more), Nicoresti says only that “it was very surreal. You get swept off the stage instantly into the press junket. They won’t let you go back to your friends. It felt like the president had been assassinated and I was being ferried away to be sworn in.”
In case the awards organisers are listening, she suggests an improvement. “They should decide who the winner is at the start of the fringe. It’s weird to leave it to the very end when you’re tired and haggard and ill. Everyone wants to ask you questions, and all you want to do is sleep.”
There’ll be time for sleep soon enough – although not that soon, as the London run of Baby Doomer is imminent and has just been extended. Audiences can expect a high joke-count show built around one big-hitting anecdote, which recounts a humiliating experience in a changing room. The comic works up that story – of being misgendered; of trying on an ill-fitting dress – into something fantastically farcical, without soft-soaping what it implies about life as a trans woman today. That’s characteristic: the show addresses its creator’s difficulty fitting in as female, but its chosen analogy for Nicoresti’s transition, proffered with great nerdy enthusiasm, is the metamorphosis of the hobbit Sméagol in Lord of the Rings into the monster Gollum. Elsewhere, it alludes to the comic’s recent breakdown, and her visit to a PTSD support group – all with lightness of touch, conviviality, and more joyful self-deprecation than self-pity.
How conscious was Nicoresti that she was, for the first time, making a non-niche, crowd-pleasing standup show? “This year we came in strong,” she admits, “with a dream and a goal in mind. In previous years, I’ve focused on the art and just wanted to make something silly. But the fringe is so expensive now that it doesn’t make sense to bring up work that isn’t ready.” She was also scarred by her experience with 2022’s Wokeflake, whose title and concept attracted critical attention, but at a level that the show, then only a work-in-progress, wasn’t quite ready for. Says Nicoresti: “I wasn’t prepared to make that mistake again.”
For Baby Doomer, she assembled a creative team that included first-time director (and longtime comedy promoter) David Hardcastle, and performed the show almost 30 times prior to the fringe. “I usually approach each show with a concept, whether it’s about dreams, aliens, or whatever. And I saw this one as a concept show too, but the concept was that I was doing ‘a standup hour’” – as opposed to the sketch, character or multimedia work she’d majored in previously. All of Baby Doomer’s routines went through rigorous testing, as five- or 10-minute sets in comedy clubs, before making it into the show.
That’s an exacting standard to set yourself, particularly if you’re making a show on a topic that’s both personally and politically sensitive. Nicoresti had intended, she tells me, not to address gender at all in Baby Doomer. She first came out as transgender as part of the process of making Wokeflake – and, across the months and years of its stage life, that show documented the early, uncertain stages of her transition. “So when I moved on to the next show, the rule I set myself was: I’m not going to mention it at all. I failed! Actually this whole show is a monumental failure!”
It was the supreme court ruling in April, that the legal definition of a woman did not include transgender women, that prompted a rethink. “I hadn’t wanted to get pigeonholed. I didn’t want to seem as if I was ‘going on about it’. But then the ruling happened and I thought, ‘Oh no, it probably is good that we talk about this.’” But the “talking about it” was subject to a strict directive. “As a private citizen, I’m angry, I’m upset and scared. But as a comedian, the joke is paramount. You don’t want to make people feel like they’re being preached to. The joke is king.”
She feels similarly about headlines this weekend greeting the first transgender comedian to win Edinburgh’s comedy award. “Obviously, it’s cool,” says the comic (who cites “seeing more queer and trans people coming to my gigs” as her main ambition post-award triumph). “But you can see there’s a framing happening that you’re not in control of. With these two shows, I’ve tried to express something about how a queer experience can actually be universal. And because of that, I got some acclaim. But part of the acclaim is ‘trans this, trans that’. So it’s a little ironic.”
On balance, Nicoresti might prefer to be seen simply as another great comic to win the award. Ask what inspired her career in comedy, and she’ll regale you with personal icons (Vic and Bob, Bill Hicks, Maria Bamford), and with tales of transcribing comedy acts in her teens, breaking them down into their component parts (“that’s a rule of three, that’s a callback”). While studying at the University of Sheffield, she found her tribe among the alt-comics, circling acts such as John Kearns and The Delightful Sausage. “I fell in with people making weird stuff and I realised I like making weird stuff,” she says. “Alternative comedy is fully in my bones. It’s more adjacent to theatre and film, in trying to express something that maybe you don’t feel you can put into words.”
For Nicoresti, that something was her gender identity. And it wasn’t until she came out as trans that she felt able to give solo standup a good go. “It’s really hard to be a standup on stage if you don’t know what you’re about,” she realises now. “Because the audience will smell it on you, that there’s something you’re hiding or not expressing. The more open I’ve got with myself, the more I’m able to dig down and find those experiences that are funny on a deeper-rooted level.”
Not that self-knowledge has made life easy. As Baby Doomer suggests, being transgender may be, for Nicoresti at least, as much a journey as a destination – and not one without its bumps in the road. Happy to report, after the quasi-spiritual experience described in the show, when she passed nine times through the Mên-an-Tol stones in Cornwall, famed for their healing properties, “I’ve felt fine since. Absolutely fine! I mean, life is hard at the moment, but it’s hard for everyone. I take the RD Laing approach of, it’s perfectly rational for us to feel insane.” But generally, she says, “I’m feeling good right now.”
And ready, after triumphing at the comedy awards, to take the entertainment world by storm? Well, one thing at a time. There’s a wedding to organise first. And as for the comedy, “the cycle is always the same,” says Nicoresti. “In January and February I get depressed and decide that I am the worst comedian in the world. Then in March I have a kernel of an idea, and we go again. Maybe that process might take longer now, because after the award I’ll get to tour this show. But apart from that – well, I’ve never won it before, so I don’t know what happens next.”