“I think you’ve got to have some kind of sickness that makes you want to see it through,” Connor Burns laughs, as the rising star of Scottish comedy reflects on his success ahead of his national tour of new show Gallus, coming to Oxford’s North Wall on Feb 13.
Burns is red hot right now. He closed the Sydney Comedy Festival Gala at the Opera House, completed an off-Broadway run at the New York Comedy Festival, is a two-time winner of the Fringe Encore Series, supported Daniel Sloss across three continents, has millions of views on TikTok, and sold over 10,000 tickets at Edinburgh Fringe 2025, adding extra performances to meet the demand.
‘you’ve got to have some kind of sickness that makes you want to see it through’
With Gallus well underway, he’s in an expansive mood and happy to talk about his roller-coaster ride through the comedy circuit. The surprise is that it took so long for him to break through.
The youngest of four, he says: “I realised really early that I wasn’t gonna get out of stuff with any kind of physical prowess so I think I got good at being funny. If I annoyed one of my siblings I’d make them laugh and get away with it.”
‘Starting out is so hard that if your heart isn’t in it you won’t make it through the first year’
But of course comedy is a hard market to break into and those early gigs were by far the toughest. “Starting out is so hard that if your heart isn’t in it you won’t make it through the first year,” he says.
“It’s funny because you begin with some of the hardest gigs you’ll ever play and as you get more successful and start playing theatres it gets easier.”
But Burns was determined to succeed and was starting to make a living out of comedy when Covid struck. “Covid was a real marker for me. I started posting stuff online and had a kind of hard reset. I thought if this ever goes back to normal I’m just gonna do it the way I want because then at least I’ll be having a good time.
‘I wanted my stand-up to be a bit more honest and a bit more raw’
So what changed? “I wanted my stand-up to be a bit more honest and a bit more raw. I felt like I was too scared to do any of that before. There’s nothing like a mass near-death experience to be able to think ‘I can talk about whatever I want’. I didn’t feel I needed to soften my jagged edges,” he says.
Since then Burns’ shows have got stronger and funnier and his popularity has rocketed – his 2023 comedy debut Vertigo garnering great reviews. In his 2024 follow-up ‘1994’ his razor-sharp wit found laughs wherever it went. And now there is his latest show, the must-see GALLUS, which mixes smart social observations and a vivid account of a road trip across America with his fiancee, which is coming to Oxford’s North Wall on February 13.
‘If you say something that’s just a wee bit tucked away in that part of your brain there’s a sigh of relief from the audience’
And as Burns loves performing, from the moment he walks onstage the audience knows they are in for a great night: “If you say something that’s just a wee bit tucked away in that part of your brain there’s a sigh of relief from the audience where everyone goes ‘Oh my god I thought I was the only person who thought that and I thought I was a terrible person.’ When you go out on a limb and the audience goes with you there’s no better feeling.”
So how does he feel looking back at those terrifying first steps of his career? “I did my first gig in 2017 in Glasgow at the Yes Bar but kept it a secret. I didn’t even tell my girlfriend at the time. I would’ve rather been caught coming out of a brothel – that would have been easier for me to explain,” he laughs.
‘as a Scottish comedian I dance on that razor of wanting to blow up the room while always checking over my shoulder’
“But I still think that as a Scottish comedian I dance on that razor of wanting to blow up the room while always checking over my shoulder to see if I might just be getting too cocky.“
Connor Burns is at The North Wall, Oxford on Feb 13. https://www.thenorthwall.com/whats-on/connor-burns-gallus/
