Comedian Stephen Gordon: The Fringe was built on risk. Comedy should be allowed to fail again.

As an Edinburgh local, one of my favourite places to watch live performance is Murrayfield. Not theatre. Not comedy. Rugby.

What I love about rugby union is watching people who have spent their entire lives becoming technically extraordinary react to chaos in real time. They have trained, drilled, rehearsed patterns and prepared for every imaginable outcome. Then someone kicks an egg-shaped ball into the air and it bounces in a way nobody could predict.

That, for me, is where the romance lives. Not just in the skill, but in what happens when skill meets uncertainty.

Live comedy has the same electricity. A brilliant comedian is not just someone who recites a polished routine. They are someone with a strange private logic and the ability to feel a room shifting beneath their feet. Comedy, at its best, is a live negotiation between idea, performer and audience.

The Edinburgh Fringe understands that better than almost anywhere. Or at least, it always has done.

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At its best, the Fringe has a punk spirit: messy, ambitious, experimental, occasionally ridiculous, sometimes life-changing. But it has also become increasingly expensive, slick and professionalised. Posters are better. PR is sharper. Reviews matter. Awards matter. A month in Edinburgh can define a comedian's career or bank balance.

That creates a gravitational pull toward one kind of show: polished, coherent, review-ready. Awards, reviews and agents do not just recognise comedy. They shape it. When the most recognised path is the polished 50-minute hour, comedians naturally optimise for that form. It is worth asking what gets squeezed out when the fastest route to legitimacy most rewards completion.

At the biggest comedy festival in the world, it is oddly difficult to find space for the most basic act in comedy: trying something out.

Katie Palmer of Brass Tacks Comedy has made a practice of finding that space. Her support helped launch Ayo Adenkan - now a writer on Saturday Night Live - and this year she is backing Eva Peroni and Kate Hammer in their Fringe debuts.

"The costs of the Fringe are rising so dramatically that there's no room to mess about," she says. "The show has to be perfect, and that closes off any sense of the Fringe being the training ground it once was."

A healthy Fringe should not just be a showroom for polished work arriving in August. It should feed the rooms, risks and communities that keep comedy alive here the other eleven months of the year.

Polished comedy can be wonderful. A great Edinburgh hour is one of the best things you can see. But comedy does not begin there. Comedy begins with failure. You take an idea to an audience and the room tells you the truth. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't.

There is also something that happens when failure goes wrong in the right way. I saw Kevin Bridges working up material at Monkey Barrel in front of about a hundred people.

The moment that stuck was not the polished routine. It was a woman suddenly running past the stage because she was desperate for the toilet, and Bridges reacting as if he might be about to have his own Will Smith moment. Everyone in the room knew they had seen something that would never happen in exactly that way again.

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There is a difference between unfinished and careless. I am not arguing for laziness, or for charging audiences to watch comedians read out scraps. The question is something else: what happens when skilled people meet genuine uncertainty? The same way a world-class rugby player uses years of training when the ball bounces wrong, a great comic uses timing, instinct and nerve when an unfinished idea suddenly has to live in front of an audience.

That is why I created Notes: The Comedy B-Sides. Comedians open their Notes app and perform live - half-written premises, 3am voice memos, strange fragments they once believed were worth saving.

What has surprised me is how quickly brilliant comics have understood the appeal. Acts with polished hours, international followings and serious reputations have still jumped at the chance - not because they have nothing finished, but because even the best comedians still want rooms where they can play.

Audiences are not being asked to lower their standards. They are being invited closer to the fire. The Fringe does not need less polish. It needs more places where the polish has not dried yet.

The unfinished thing is not the opposite of excellence. It is where excellence starts.

Notes: The Comedy B-Sides runs at Just the Tonic, The Caves, 11:40 pm from 6th–30th August, excluding 18th August.

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