If the advent of Saturday Night Live UK has offered an Edinburgh Fringe boost for the stars of the show performing here then it’s also offered a calling care to SNL UK’s legion of writers – many of them terrific stand-ups who presumably came close to being included in the performing line-up but there was simply no room for them.
One suspects Bella Hull would have been a shoo in if the ‘acerbic female Gen Z stand-up’ slot wasn’t comprehensively filled already by the more famous Ania Magliano, but the volume of press and profiles that have greeted Hull’s latest set suggest she’s waiting in the wings if a vacancy comes up.
Who cares if she’s a mean girl when the jokes are this funny?
Her schtick on Mad Cow Disease is relentlessly ironic, relentlessly acidic and extremely funny. She wields withering disdain like a samurai with a sword and clearly lies as easily as she breathes, with an opening routine that ends with as spectacularly stone-cold piece of rug-pulling as I’ve ever seen in a comedy show.
I’ve no doubt she mines her real life for inspiration: it is not unbelievable that she spent 2025 single; her whole extremely amusing reminiscence about having a chaotic upbringing being raised by her mum and grandma would surely be too random to have made up. But she applies a zingy, lightly poisonous filter to everything – a sequence where she is gratuitously horrible about her flatmate is funny precisely because it’s so wildly over the top.
I guess the underpinning assumption is that she’s probably not mean and that this is all very ironic. She’s certainly too self-lacerating to come across as nasty. But who really cares if she’s a mean girl when the jokes are this funny?
