‘Comedy’s what I’m alive to do’ … Hull spent formative years with her grandma who liked to garden naked. Photograph: Michael Julings View image in fullscreen ‘Comedy’s what I’m alive to do’ … Hull spent formative years with her grandma who liked to garden naked. Photograph: Michael Julings Edinburgh festival 2026 Interview ‘Men have 30 seconds to get a laugh. Women have 10’: standup Bella Hull on proving herself in rough clubs Rachael Healy She started standup at 17 playing ‘unsafe basements’ and braving revolting hecklers – and even worse headline acts. Now she writes for SNL and is giving Edinburgh a blast of her surreal comedy
Mon 10 Aug 2026 09.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google Comedy isn’t just a career for Bella Hull. It’s a compulsion. “Standup for me is like – I have to do it,” says Hull, who first picked up a mic aged 17. “Regardless of what the response is.”
A decade in, the response is resoundingly positive. The 28-year-old had a sell-out show at last year’s Edinburgh fringe ( Doctors Hate Her , which explored a break-up, insanity and the occult), appearances on Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz, and a coveted role as writer on the new UK version of Saturday Night Live. “There’s something symbolic about being the person with the voice,” she says of standup. “A lot of situations in my personal life, I don’t feel like that at all.”
A famous older male comic made jokes about how they were going to rape me after the show. Everyone was laughing Hull was a shy child, constantly on edge amid her parents’ “messy” marriage breakdown, an outsider at a private girls’ school where she was “mixed race and overweight”. She lived in London and Kent, including formative years with her “expressive” grandma, who was often found barefoot or gardening naked. Comedy provided solace and she would watch standup specials and record her observations in a journal, until the urge to do it herself became too strong to ignore.
The decade since has been spent “in some of the most unsafe basements you could possibly imagine”, Hull jokes, as she threw herself into the comedy circuit. She studied history of art at Cambridge, drawn there by its comedy heritage. But the ubiquity of Footlights’ alumni among the comedy pantheon led Hull to the grittier world of comedy clubs. “I was obsessed with paying my dues,” she says. “I met a lot of people at Cambridge that had ‘golden boy syndrome’. They would sit back and think, ‘Where’s my TV show?’ Well, you don’t fucking deserve a TV show because you’re not good enough. Can you make a stag party in Nottingham laugh? I don’t think so.”
View image in fullscreen ‘Golden boy – can you make a stag party in Nottingham laugh? I don’t think so’ … Hull on stage. Photograph: Stephen Keable/Alamy Stock Photo/Alamy Live News. On stage, she melds a compelling persona – a woman on the edge, fixed smile concealing a spikier centre – with formidable craft, tightly written gags peppering every topic. “I just got a personal trainer,” goes a line from Doctors Hate Her that made this paper’s best jokes list from last year’s Edinburgh festival. “She’s horrible to me but my body goal is a thicker skin.”
Among the neat punchlines, her shows traverse disordered eating, family breakdown, relationship issues and mental health. As the old meme goes, inside Hull there are two wolves: one, the club-drilled comic subduing audiences with an unprecedented gag rate; the other, a tortured artist forging meaning from her darkest…