Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world's largest performing arts festival, held every August in Edinburgh, Scotland. In 2025 it ran for 25 days, selling more than 2.6 million tickets and featuring 53,942 performances of 3,893 shows across 301 venues, with participants from 68 countries. Among global ticketed events it is surpassed only by the Olympics and the World Cup.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe began in 1947, when eight theatre companies turned up uninvited to the inaugural Edinburgh International Festival. The name "Fringe" was coined by Scottish playwright and journalist Robert Kemp in 1948. The Festival Fringe Society, which formally organises the event, was established in 1959.
The Edinburgh Fringe is open-access because it has no selection committee and anyone may participate with any type of performance. This policy was written into the Festival Fringe Society's founding constitution in 1959. The Society's role is to facilitate logistics, not to vet or censor shows.
Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead received its full premiere at the 1966 Fringe. Phoebe Waller-Bridge first performed Fleabag as a solo show at Underbelly in 2013 before it became a television series. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss's musical Six debuted at the 1966 Fringe in 2017 before transferring to the West End and Broadway.
Comedy overtook theatre as the largest section of the Edinburgh Fringe programme in 2008, with 660 comedy entries compared to 599 for theatre. By the 2015 Fringe, comedy accounted for 34% of the programme. The Perrier Awards, which later became the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, were first given in 1981.
The planned 2020 Edinburgh Festival Fringe was suspended entirely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2021 festival returned in reduced form from the 6th to the 30th of August, with 528 in-person shows and 414 online. The 2022 festival marked a return to pre-pandemic levels with 3,334 shows, and by 2024 the Fringe registered the second highest number of shows in its history.