Bella Hull was just 17 when she first walked into what she describes as an “unsafe basement” and picked up a microphone. No safety net, no experience, just a teenager with something to say and the nerve to say it in front of a room full of strangers who were not necessarily rooting for her.
A decade later, that same drive has taken the 28-year-old comedian from grimy open mic nights to writing for the UK version of Saturday Night Live, selling out shows at the Edinburgh Fringe and popping up on panel shows like Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz. Not bad for someone who says she got into standup less out of ambition and more out of compulsion.
“Standup for me is like I have to do it,” Hull says. “Regardless of what the response is.”
The response these days is pretty hard to argue with. Her 2025 Edinburgh show, Doctors Hate Her, was a sell-out run that mixed personal chaos with surreal comedy, touching on a break-up, questions about her own sanity and a detour into the occult. It was the kind of show that reminded audiences why live comedy can do things that no TV panel show ever quite manages.
But getting to that point was not a straightforward journey. Hull came up through the kind of grassroots comedy circuit that chews up performers and spits them out. She talks openly about the double standard she faced early on, the way female comedians are given far less time to win a crowd over before judgment is passed.
“Men have 30 seconds to get a laugh,” she says. “Women have 10.”
That is not a complaint so much as a statement of fact about the reality of performing in rough clubs where audiences arrive with assumptions already baked in. Hull learned to work faster, hit harder and establish herself before the room had a chance to decide it was not interested. It shaped her style in ways that are still visible today, a kind of controlled urgency that keeps audiences leaning forward.
The hecklers were part of it too. Hull has dealt with her share of revolting ones over the years, the kind that would make a lot of people quietly pack up and find a different hobby. She did not. If anything, learning to handle a hostile room gave her a confidence that more sheltered routes into the industry rarely provide.
There is also something interesting in what she says about standup giving her a voice she does not always feel she has in real life. “There is something symbolic about being the person with the voice,” she explains. “A lot of situations in my personal life, I do not feel like that at all.”
It is a surprisingly honest admission from someone who spends her working life commanding rooms. But it also explains why the stage matters so much to her beyond just the career side of things. It is a space where she gets to be in control of the narrative, something that clearly does not come as naturally off the mic.
Hull is back at Edinburgh this year with a new show, bringing her brand of surreal, sharp comedy back to the festival that has done a lot to raise her profile. The Fringe remains one of the best places in the country to catch comedians doing genuinely ambitious work, and Hull fits that bill well. She is not interested in playing it safe or recycling the kind of material that gets easy laughs from a comfortable crowd.
The SNL gig is a significant milestone too. The UK version of the long-running American sketch show has been a major talking point, and landing a writing role on it puts Hull in a very different league from the basement open mics where she started out. It is the kind of credit that opens doors, though knowing Hull, she will probably keep doing the smaller shows anyway because that is just who she is.
British standup has produced some remarkable voices over the past few years and Hull is shaping up to be one of the more distinctive ones. She has the stage time behind her, the sharp writing instincts and the lived experience of having earned her place in rooms that were not always willing to give it to her.
For anyone heading to Edinburgh this summer, her show is one worth getting a ticket for early.