The Edinburgh Fringe’s ‘Funniest Joke’ of 2019 Is All About Food

Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2019 has its best restaurants, and now it has its funniest joke: the honour going to a Swedish surrealist comedian whose name and gags lean heavily on food. Olaf Falafel took home the best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe 2019 award, sponsored by blokes-jokes-cars-booze-blokes-LADS channel Dave, with a joke based on plants. 2019, it never gets old.

Falafel, if that is his real name, accepted the award for a joke with another joke / total non sequitur also about food, saying: “This is a fantastic honour but it’s like I’ve always said: jokes about white sugar are rare, jokes about brown sugar … Demerara.”

Falafel was the only top 10 entrant to drop food into his routine, despite it being a relative staple of Fringe comedy. Two further standouts this year include Emmy Blotnick’s Party Nights, in which the Late Show with Stephen Colbert writer overhears a terrible bagel order and successfully coerces the diner into just ordering a muffin, and Pierre Novellie’s You’re Expected to Care, which thrilled Guardian restaurant critic Grace Dent with its observations on the puzzling wetness of British food (and the moral dilemmas around the return of ‘ISIS bride’ Shamima Begum to the U.K.)

Falafel’s joke, then:

I keep randomly shouting out ‘Broccoli’ and ‘Cauliflower’ – I think I might have Florets.

• Olaf Falafel wraps up victory in Edinburgh funniest joke award [Guardian]
• Where to Eat at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival [ELDN]