Comedian Lorna Rose Treen has been crowned the winner of the Funniest Joke of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2023. Her winning joke goes: “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.” The joke received high rankings from 44% of the surveyed audience.
Lorna Rose Treen is the first female comedian to win this prestigious accolade since Zoe Lyons in 2008. She expressed her delight at winning and thanked everyone for awarding her “stupid joke” with this title. Lorna is a graduate from the University of Edinburgh and has a background in BBC production and theater studies.
Here are the top 10 jokes from the 2023 Fringe Festival, with Lorna’s zookeeper joke taking the top spot:
1. “I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah” – Lorna Rose Treen
2. “The most British thing I’ve ever heard? A lady who said ‘Well I’m sorry, but I don’t apologize'” – Liz Guterbock
3. “Last year I had a great joke about inflation. But it’s hardly worth it now” – Amos Gill
4. “When women gossip we get called bitchy; but when men do it’s called a podcast” – Sikisa
5. “I thought I’d start off with a joke about The Titanic – just to break the ice” – Masai Graham
6. “How do coeliac Germans greet each other? Gluten tag” – Frank Lavender
7. “My friend got locked in a coffee place overnight. Now he only ever goes into Starbucks, not the rivals. He’s Costa-phobic” – Roger Swift
8. “I entered the ‘How not to surrender’ competition and I won hands down” – Bennett Arron
9. “Nationwide must have looked pretty silly when they opened their first branch” – William Stone
10. “My grandma describes herself as being in her ‘twilight years’ which I love because they’re great films” – Daniel Foxx
The Funniest Joke of the Fringe Award has been running for 14 years, with comedian Masai Graham, last year’s winner, being a runner-up this year. The award is determined by a panel of comedy critics who attend numerous shows and select their favorite jokes. These jokes are then voted on by 2,000 members of the public anonymously.
The Edinburgh Festival Fringe is the world’s largest performance art festival, held annually in August. This year’s event featured 3,535 shows across 248 different venues, close to the record-breaking numbers seen in 2019 before the pandemic led to the cancellation of the 2020 festival.