Ania Magliano was sitting beside her “Weekend Update” co-host, Paddy Young, at his birthday party not long ago — in the same formation they use on Britain’s “Saturday Night Live” — when a few people stopped and asked for photos.
“I was like: Maybe we shouldn’t be sitting literally like we’re in ‘Weekend Update,’” she said in a recent interview, adding that there was “definitely an uptick” in people recognizing her since the show became a surprise hit this spring.
Magliano, one of the several comedians to get an overnight career boost from the show, is one of its breakout stars. Now, she and a number of others from the cast and writing team are performing at this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, many of them festival veterans returning in something of a victory lap.
Magliano, 28, from Buckinghamshire, England, said she wasn’t necessarily getting recognized on the streets of Edinburgh, where the Fringe runs through Aug. 31. But her stand-up comedy show — “Peach Fuzz,” in which she likens Winston Churchill to a Gen Z girl and describes a transformative trip to a sensory deprivation chamber — sold out its run weeks before the festival started on Friday.
She said that so far the biggest difference was the enthusiasm of the Edinburgh audiences, who “are really up for it.” At one show, two people in the front row were wearing homemade “Weekend Update” T-shirts featuring her face alongside Young’s.
Magliano began attending the Fringe at 18, initially working as a receptionist and seeing stand-up shows. She said she packed in so much that she would sometimes sleep for just an hour a night, and then take naps on a bathroom floor.
The glut of comedy made her want to start doing stand-up herself, so she started gigging and eventually returned to Edinburgh to perform. Yet while she’s had successful runs at the Fringe before, lifted by her appearances on the popular British comedy game show “Taskmaster,” “S.N.L.” has taken things to a different level.
“Weekend Update” clips in particular have had wide reach on social media, including edgy jokes about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (the disgraced former Prince Andrew) and one about Mark Zuckerberg and Hitler’s bunker that generated some outrage.
“I was definitely surprised by the scale of the response,” said Magliano, who pointed to being recognized by the comedian Graham Norton after bumping into him in the TV studio, and having an “S.N.L.” sketch retweeted by President Trump, as moments that made her realize how big it was.
The festival can often be a dog-eat-dog experience for performers, who face high costs and intense competition from thousands of others trying to draw in the audiences who flock to Edinburgh throughout August. But Britain’s “S.N.L.,” which returns for a second season in September, has given tailwinds to cast members like Young, of “Weekend Update,” who has also sold out most of his Fringe run, and Larry Dean, a stand-up comedian from Glasgow.
Dean, 36, first performed at the Fringe a decade ago, passing out fliers for a show in exchange for 10 minutes of stage time. This year, he’s performing a show called “Hellbent,” which is then scheduled to tour Britain.
“Before ‘S.N.L.,’” he said, “it was literally just: tour, Fringe, tour, Fringe. It was just nothing but stand-up,” and he hadn’t done much sketch comedy. But now he gets recognized for his King Charles III or Louis Theroux impersonations on the show — though “I don’t get much love for my Peter Mandelson,” he said, referring to Britain’s former ambassador the U.S. who was fired for his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Dean said he wasn’t surprised that “S.N.L.” was a hit, despite the naysayers beforehand: “British people are just so used to being disappointed that we now just have low expectations for everything.”
For him, that’s extended to his lifestyle at the Fringe, where pricey accommodation often leads performers to stay in grimy places. A past apartment had mice and, he thinks, a flying cockroach. This year, he’s staying in student housing. “God knows what’s happened in that room before I got there,” he said.
Yet for most performers at the Fringe, the struggles are worth the potential exposure.
Ayo Adenekan, 25, a stand-up from Edinburgh who is a writer for Britain’s “S.N.L.,” said the festival was now a place for comedians to be scouted for the show: He was first approached after the showrunner came to see his first solo hour at last year’s festival.
A common refrain, said Adenekan, whose show “Homeland Insecurity” has sold out most of the festival’s first two weeks, is that “the ideal story” is that of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose career began at the festival with “Fleabag.” But with “S.N.L.,” he said, “there’s another pipeline there. There is somewhere to go post-Fringe.”
For Magliano, who will take “Peach Fuzz” on tour in Britain and the United States in November, being back at the Fringe is as much “Stockholm syndrome” as a return to “my roots.”
But she couldn’t envision a scenario in which fame would stop her from coming back — unless, she joked, “I’m in back-to-back Marvel films.”
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