Lil Wenker is an award-winning clown, writer, and actor from Minnesota who is back at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with her brand-new show, BOYKING. Since selling out her debut clown Western, BANGTAIL, in 2024 and touring across five countries, she has become a staple of the UK alternative circuit. Nominated for the Komedia Award for Alternative Comedy earlier this year, Wenker returns with a dark, daft, and drastically different horror bouffon comedy, with a national and international tour and several screen projects on the horizon.
Tell us about your comedy style.
I make super rowdy, physical work. As a trained clown, I LOVE the audience and playing with different audience energies night to night. I often incorporate a lot of improv and a fair amount of audience interaction (don’t be scared!) in the show because, to be honest, I just want to play! Also I find myself really drawn to gender-bending characters, most often making work where I play men. I find myself freer with a big costume and even bigger personality and I can work outside my own sense of politeness, vocabulary, physicality, etc.
What’s your show about and where can we see it?
BOYKING is a horror clown musical about an evil eight-year-old boy who will stop at nothing to become the king! I’ve been thinking a lot about power, specifically the ways in which one person’s power affects another’s and the ways in which we might all want some for ourselves. I’ve had fun blending genres, from horror to musical theatre to clown, and I’m playing with a lot of elements I’ve never explored before in solo work. It’s on at Bunker 1, Pleasance Courtyard at 21:45 daily.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
My comedy focuses on what I call The Small Tragedies of the Everyday: the beauty of the average person trying (and often failing) in stupid and sincere ways. We see it, and experience it, in our lives all the time. So mostly I observe people, my own (sometimes extreme and highly dramatic) emotions, and work from there. The characters I create, then, have big aspirations inside of mundanity. I find aspiration comedically delicious.
What do you think makes great comedy/content/sitcom/etc?
Great characters! I’d argue that every great piece of comedy boils down to hyper-specific and therefore extremely relatable characters. People are the reason situations become funny, misunderstandings can play out, drama can unfold. I absolutely love ensemble-driven sitcoms where the comedy just bounces between weird little freak to weird little freak.
Who are your favourite Funny Women?
Julia Louis-Dreyfus: absolutely unafraid to be nasty on screen which is brilliant! How wonderful for a woman to just take up space, be ambitious, and not apologise for it!
Natalie Palamides: seeing her play WEER to hundreds, at times over a thousand people a night, was phenomenal. She is so ambitious in her work and her career, and she’s constantly pushing what clown can do, for herself on stage and how the world receives it.
Nina Conti: I think Nina is one of the most brilliant people in that she’s brought alternative comedy into the mainstream so cleverly! She is truly a master improviser. I specifically love her work, though, because it celebrates the audience and makes the people she interacts with feel safe and funny in their own right.
Keep up to date with and follow Lil Wenker on Instagram and X.
Tickets and more information for BOYKING can be found here!
