The winner of the Edinburgh Festival “Best Comedy Show” 2025 is Sam Nicoresti, splashed across all the newspapers last weekend as “the first transgender winner” of this prestigious award.
Sam is described in the Telegraph as “a trail blazer” and a “goofy, geeky star in the making”. On his win Nicoresti tells us:
Winning the award sure is swell, I’m super excited and stoked and jazzed. I did this for the queers making weird art, and it’s a privilege to share this moment with the first all-female line-up of award winners.
Sam Nicoresti is not female, he is a man who wears thrift shop mini dresses in order to convince the world he is a woman. Sam has done little more than spot a glaring gap in the comedy market and make an opportunistic land grab. He attempts to make his audience laugh whilst joking about his life as a “trans woman” which he appears to have lived for just a couple of years. As recently as 2021 Sam was complaining about being ignored as a man. In fact, according to one report, he was a “prince of overthinking.”
It has certainly been a swift “transition” from unknown male comedian to award-winning male comedian saying he’s a woman. It appears that the words “trans woman” have opened doors to Sam which were previously closed in his face. He must be delighted at pulling off this particular joke on the rest of us. Mining the rich seam of obsession with all things “trans” is lucrative, as the £10,000 prize money demonstrates.
Perhaps Sam took an envious look at the career trajectory of another talent-free opportunist Dylan Mulvaney and realised it was open to him too. Mulvaney, a forgotten musical theatre actor unable to make progress in his career, reinvented himself as “a girl” and is now worth an estimated $2 million. “Becoming trans” pays well and being the “first” at something is an important stamp to secure on your CV.
As quite a few commentators online have noted about Nicoresti, “he’s not even trying”. Whilst his comedy does indeed smack of teenage underachievement, they are referring to the fact that Nicoresti appears to have made minimal attempts to try to “look female”. He has a shaggy hairdo common to any lazy male student, a smear of lipstick for shows only, and a variety of unappealing charity shop blouses. Sam’s stance, voice and gestures are undeniably male, because he is a man.
Sam laughs in his comedy about any demands that men like him appear to “do something” to prove you are a woman. In his previous routine, “Wokefest”, which apparently informs the award-winning “Baby Doomer”, he says, “You have to give them something!” The underlying argument to this joke is that being “manly” should not exclude you from being “womanly”. He stresses that if society requires him to present himself in a way more stereotypically female, then they should provide the means for him to do so. He insists therefore, that men need to do nothing more than say they are a woman — nothing else should be required of them. Sam’s argument is circular and self-defeating. It could equally be asked how it is possible to tell a man is pretending to be a woman, if he isn’t even going through the motions of pretending. The notion of becoming “trans” is then one of mere semantics, as gender critical women have long insisted. It is meaningless. Clothes are simply clothes, not magic sex-changing garments, as both Sam and women know.
Nicoresti enjoyed his win on his Instagram where he poses for a smiling selfie — sitting in a women’s toilet holding his Edinburgh Festival award in one hand and putting his middle finger up at the camera with the other. He added the words: “My gender recognition certificate”.
It would be hard for Nicoresti to insult women more than this. He sits next to a sanitary bin where women deposit their used period products. This will never be required by Sam, because despite all difficulties he faces when pretending to be a woman — such as finding the perfect skirt suit — he will never need to shed his womb. There is no real way of pretending to do this and women would tell Sam, there aren’t many laughs in it. This picture encompasses Nicoresti’s hatred of the boundaries women establish around their single-sex spaces.
In his comedy routine “Wokefest”, which was the launchpad for his recent Edinburgh performance, Sam displays a worrying level of hostility towards “TERF” women. He derides each argument gender critical women have made in order to secure single-sex spaces and sports. He ends that routine by suggesting that “trans people are dying, they are being killed”. He appears to think clear — without evidence — that TERFs have created this landscape with their defence of women’s rights.
Nicoresti demands access to women’s toilets and advocates for men to access women’s sports. He says:
I thought the whole point of sport was that someone has an unfair physical advantage. That’s sport. One person wins. 99% of professional sports players are losers for a living.
He thinks women are losers if they are beaten in their own sex category of their chosen sport by a man pretending to be a woman. This is like saying that Manny Pacquiao would have been a “loser” if Wladimir Klitschko had “identified” as a lightweight boxer. I thought satire was about exposing other people’s ignorance, not your own?
One of Nicoresti’s most sick-making jokes is about turning his girlfriend into a lesbian. This is one of the very serious issues that women face when men declare themselves to have changed sex — they also demand that women change their lives, and sometimes sexualities too. Women’s sexualities are not fluid according to a man’s identity choices.
In another past routine, Nicoresti accuses women of committing acts of violence against women by focusing only on men in women’s toilets:
If they care so much about guarding women, why they only talk about doing it in the Wagamama loos? Never in the streets or their jobs or on the buses or in their homes. It’s duplicitous. It is using violence against women to perpetuate further violence against women.
This dismisses all the women working to prevent violence against women. (It can be happening even if you didn’t notice, Sam.) It is a cynical and despicable attack on women working to save other women from violent men.
Nicoresti knows the joke is on women —- and anyone who asserts that he is just “having a laugh” is excusing the stance of every abusive man who tells a woman the same when he has insulted her. Most women who have been viciously insulted will have been told “I was only joking! Where’s your sense of humour?” It is gaslighting — and it is cruel. Punches, aimed at women, are hidden in the punchlines.
Did Nicoresti not expect the hostile messages about women lurking in his comedy to be identified? This overestimates his own genius and underestimates the intelligence of women. What Nicoresti might find is that his political rants may have been well-received by a set of judges scrabbling for EDI points, but the wider public are very much less likely to laugh at a spiteful hack.
