Power

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Power 〰️

The Edinburgh Fringe is back for 2026, and with it, our annual feature series! This year, we’re taking on POWER: Who’s got it? Where is it? Where should it be? How do you get it? Our comedians are the only ones with the answers.

By Brit Barron

There's a particular kind of power that only forbidden things have. And nobody understands that power better than a kid who grew up in a megachurch.

I'm not talking fire-and-brimstone stuff. My parents were lovely. We had a good life. It's just that the world outside our house came with a spiritual risk assessment attached, and certain items had been quietly flagged as threats to my eternal soul. Looking back, I think the church underestimated how effective this was as a marketing strategy. Nothing makes something more appealing than telling a child they absolutely cannot have it.

While other kids were freely collecting CDs and watching MTV, I was building a mental list. You know the one. The list of things you wanted so badly precisely because you couldn't have them. Growing up super religious was like growing up with the knock-off version of everything. Instead of Halloween we had Hallelujah Night; same costumes, same candy, technically identical in every measurable way, just somehow way less cool. I knew kids who weren't allowed to eat Lucky Charms because of the magic. The little cartoon leprechaun was deemed a bridge too far.

In that spirit, I present: my official contraband list, ranked by how bad God would have felt about it (from Mildly Sinful to Eternal Damnation)

TIER ONE: Mildly Sinful (God is watching but probably not taking notes)

Lucky Charms. The gateway drug. If your parents flagged a breakfast cereal, you were in for a very specific childhood.

Pop music with a beat. Not explicit lyrics, just a beat. A persuasive beat. The kind that made your hips do something that was not church approved.

Butterfly clips and low-rise jeans. The fashion of the early 2000s was effectively also a moral concern. Pretty sure this had a lot to do with what was showing from low rise jeans when you bend over.

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TIER TWO: Actively Negotiating with God

Harry Potter. Witchcraft, obviously. My friends who were banned from it became the most obsessive fans I have ever met in my life. That’s the power of prohibition, baby.

Rated R movies. Not impossible to access. Just required a lengthy internal negotiation with God afterwards, a sort of spiritual debrief. Was it worth it? Did I learn anything? Am I changed? (Cruel Intentions required quite a lengthy repentance from me personally)

TLC's CrazySexyCool. I got my hands on a copy. I'm not saying how. What I will say is that "Waterfalls" was nothing compared to “Red Light Special”

TIER THREE: Significant Spiritual Risk

South Park. I watched maybe four episodes at a friend's house and then didn't tell anyone for about six years.

Any stand-up comedy album. Stand-up comedians, as a category of person, were not exactly on the approved list. Too many bad words, too sweaty (a sin for some reason…), too liable to say something true about God that you couldn't un-hear.

Which brings me to how I found myself in this very category…

Chris Rock: Bigger & Blacker. My older brother burned me a CD. Just the audio, no video, no visuals, just Chris Rock's voice on a burned disc my brother handed me with sharpie written on the top of it. My brother had the quiet confidence of someone who had already figured out what I was supposed to do with my life.

I listened to it in my car, alone of course. With the volume low enough that I could turn it off quickly if needed. I must have listened to that CD fifty times. I laughed so hard I had to pull over. I'd never heard anyone talk like that, that honest, that precise, that funny… about the world as it actually was.

Years later, when I left for college, a Christian college, to be precise, my brother showed up with a DVD box set. Chappelle's Show, Season One. I watched it in my dorm room with the door shut. I laughed until I cried. And then, every single time, I felt a little bad about how much I'd laughed. And then I'd watch another episode.

I grew up to do comedy that is not really like either of those guys; different stories, different style, different everything. But what it gave me was proof that comedy could tell the truth. That it could say the thing nobody was saying and make a room feel less alone for hearing it.

They broadened my horizon at a time when my horizon was quite carefully managed. I've been grateful ever since.

That's the power, really. Not the contraband itself, but what it unlocked.

Brit Barron: CHURCH is running at Gilded Balloon Teviot (Nook) from Aug 5-30th, (except Mondays) at 12:40. Tickets here