Each year, for three weeks, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe transforms the city into a comedy capital, taking over hundreds of venues across the city, including a large portion of the University of Edinburgh. Rooms that often serve as lectures halls become open to audiences from across the globe and comedy clubs’ schedules become tightly packed with back-to-back shows all day long. But for the other 11 months, Scotland’s capital, its comedy scene, and universities are entirely different. No one understands this better than Eva Peroni.
An up-and-coming local comedian as well as a student at the University of Edinburgh, Eva Peroni is making her mark on this year’s Fringe with her debut show and multitude of awards. The Student sat down with her to hear about her experience at the festival, the city’s comedy scene on the whole, and how it intersects with her student experience.
Making her debut at the Fringe this year, Peroni has received a warm welcome, with a flurry of success including receiving a Bestie ‘Emerging Talent Award’ and winning the Chortle Student Comedy Awards, as well as countless sold-out dates for her standup show Jungled. While she came into the festival supported by the Brass Tacks Debut Fringe Fund, which enabled Jungled to exist, Peroni “never expected it to go this way,” surprised at the vast wave of support and success she’s received. The fund has “made such a massive difference” to Jungled by providing economic support as well as a strong team focusing on production, PR, and even direction. Alongside this, the general buzz around the fund started Peroni on the right foot, with 25 per cent of tickets being sold – over double the norm for debut shows.
Making your debut is always going to be hard, however, and Eva Peroni is entirely honest about this reality. With more shows and more sell-outs comes more pressure, and Peroni notes how “it’s been strange, especially being so young – I find it difficult to emotionally manage it all.” Though her Brass Tacks team has been incredibly supportive, with her stressing how she couldn’t have done it without them, being almost half the age of many comedians has made it “difficult to form normal relationships with people in the comedy industry,” making the festival more challenging. The lack of young support is also an issue in audiences, with many students going home for summer or unable to afford attending many Fringe shows. Peroni recalls how “there’s never been a day where it’s been majority young” in her crowd at Jungled, something she finds quite difficult as her standup material mainly references her experiences of being young and a student.
Despite these struggles and the balance with her studies meaning when it was exam season and she had essays due, she was “literally doing them backstage in comedy clubs,” Peroni notes the importance of starting her comedy career now: she argues that her university schedule, student loan, and the lack of responsibilities, such as children, means “being a student is great for doing comedy because it gives the flexibility to focus on it without really having to have a real job.” Additionally, starting out now means that when Peroni graduates, she will be further in her career, playing better and more well-paid slots in shows, making the job more economically feasible.
Already, Peroni is making her mark on the local comedy scene year-round, regularly taking slots in many of the comedy clubs, including co-hosting Hot Comedy. In January alone, she gigged almost every other night, with 13 shows across Edinburgh and Glasgow. During the Fringe though, it all changes. From Peroni’s perspective, “when it’s not the Fringe, comedy is the best job in the entire world […] and then the Fringe comes, and it all becomes this big competition.” With over 1,600 comedy shows squeezed into 24 days, there’s absolutely no denying that competition and comparison is rife. While Peroni agrees that the Fringe makes for a wonderful atmosphere, with it “nice to see the city full of creative people,” it’s not hard to understand why for her, as a local standup, the comedy scene is “so much nicer” for the other 11 months of the year.
Furthermore, Peroni, who grew up in Livingston, spoke about how although the Fringe is based in Scotland, it doesn’t necessarily serve the Scottish people. Though she finds it “so unbelievably lucky for us [locals] that we have it here on our doorstep,” in her view, the Fringe is “not really for your normal Scottish people still […] that’s not the target audience for most shows.” This is something Peroni’s witnessed herself, seeing many of Livingston’s residents not making the 30-minute journey to the festival, something she finds common across “your normal working-class towns in Scotland.”
Additionally, Peroni’s mixed emotions towards her Scottish identity is something she discusses freely in her standup show Jungled. While she argues it is “really important” that she is the first Scottish winner of the Student Chortle Awards, she thinks “we shouldn’t always be defined by our nationality first.” She sees that Scottish comedians have “a different sort of comedy and often that gets quite overlooked,” perhaps further so with the lack of Scottish audiences.
As the Fringe draws to a close, Peroni is looking to continue onwards with her stand up nights at Edinburgh’s comedy clubs, aiming to build up to bigger slots, alongside going into her third year of studying law. An incredibly talented and passionate comedian, Eva Peroni certainly has a lot to give to the comedy community- not just for three weeks a year, and not just in Edinburgh.
Eva Peroni: Jungled is running until 30 August at Gilded Balloon Teviot. Buy tickets here.
Image by Ethan Doherty, provided to The Student as press material.
