Comedian Andrew Maxwell famously once called the Edinburgh Festival Fringe ‘exams for clowns’, and each year it’s the comics with the best jokes who get the ‘A’ grades.
The Edinburgh Comedy Award (formerly the Perrier Award) is handed out each year to the top clown in the class, and since 2008 is has been joined by The Funniest Joke of the Fringe Award.
Presented by television channel Dave, each year a shortlist of 10-15 jokes was drawn up by some of the leading comedy critics and comedians in the UK.
Designed to celebrate “the art of joke writing” and making people laugh, the general public then voted for the eventual winner.
This week it was announced that ‘U&Dave’s Funniest Joke Of The Fringe’, as it’s now called, would be scrapped from the 2025 Fringe, with the TV station behind the gong saying it is “resting”.
So we thought it would be the perfect time to revisit the 16 jokes that have made the grade since the prize was established.
1. 2024: Mark Simmons
"I was going to sail around the globe in the world’s smallest ship, but I bottled it." | Contributed
2. 2023: Lorna Rose Treen
"I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah." | Contributed
3. 2022: Masai Graham
"I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn't get pasta." | Contributed
4. 2021: Masai Graham
"I thought the word "Caesarean" began with the letter "S" but when I looked in the dictionary, it was in the "C" section." | Contributed