EDFRINGE 2025: PLEASANCE
Sam Williams
touch me not
PLEASANCE
Pleasance Courtyard
Below
TOUCH ME NOT
30th July - 24th August
(no 11th August)
Photo Credit: Michael Julings
June, 17, 2025
Sam Williams has a confession to make. He’s supposed to be at a monastery in France right now. Instead he’s making his Fringe debut. Why? Like any good queer Christian, Sam has gossip to spill, so don't miss out on Sam’s highly anticipated maiden hour. Sam will explore the themes of growing up queer without a sense of community, and finding affirmation in the last place he would have expected: church.
Hi Sam, thank you for being part of our interview series for Edfringe 2025, with this being your debut Edfringe, any nerves?
Yes! They’re mainly about finding the time outside of my day job to polish the show up enough. I’m really really excited about the hour I am making so I just want to do it justice by making it as finished as possible in time for the festival. Fringe specific nerves are more to do with the fact that I survived off very frequent portions of tinned mackerel in Edinburgh last year but I have to switch to sardines this year to avoid mercury poisoning. So I am not sure if that will impact my performance. Me and mackerel remain an iconic duo 2-3 times a week, a limit that is recommended to avoid mercury poisoning.
What does it mean to you to bring your debut show Touch Me Not to Pleasance this summer?
Everything and nothing. I’ve done standup for 7 years, this’ll be my fourth consecutive Fringe but my first hour long show. I think of it as like your dissertation as a new act before you graduate into adult comedian life. Making a show and arriving an artistic statement is a very special moment. Doing so at a time that is wracked by genocide, poverty, and injustice is a strange experience. It’s not a ‘what’s the point’ sense I have, more that making a show in peacetime is a privileged and absolutely frivolous endeavour and therefore shouldn’t be overthought.
You’ve already had some amazing success, what has it meant you to know that people are really connecting with your comedy?
To be honest, because most of that ‘success’ has only happened online, it’s hard to feel that connection yet. I think this show will be the moment when it actually starts to feel like a bit more of my lived reality. Like many comics I still have a day job so just making the time for comedy has been the main challenge/focus rather than thinking about how people connect to it. Also making this hour I have been very selfish and not really thought about how people will receive it - I have just tried to make something I would like to watch. In any case I can’t wait to be doing an hour in person at the Fringe and actually seeing if my act does speak to people!
Are you looking forward to catching many other shows during your month up at the festival?
Besides last year when I did the Pleasance Reserve, so could just enjoy the feeling of being at the Festival, I have typically not seen loads of stuff while I’ve been up because I haven’t had the money or energy. Last year I saw about 40 shows and it was absolutely amazing to take in so much incredible work. This year I want to see and support a lot of my fellow debutants - especially Sharon Wanjohi, Ayoade Bamgboye, Rohan Sharma, Roger O’Sullivan, and Hasan Al-Habib, among countless others. It fills me with joy to be doing my first show at the same time as so many brilliant comedians!
With over 100m + views online, does this add any additional pressure on you?
Not at all. I am an unashamed clickbait merchant online but I also haven’t made much money off that stuff so there’s no fixed relation between what I do online and on stage. I think it will be exciting to see how people who’ve seen me on social media engage with the show, which is a much more rounded and I would say confessional type of interaction with me.
What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced bringing Touch Me Not to the stage?
Talking about Christianity without losing people was really hard to begin with. As a happy go lucky boy next door type of act, audiences have always at least wanted to like me even when my act was shabbier. Earnestly talking about life as a queer Christian was the first topic I found that could create loads of tension and lose large portions of any audience. I knew this topic had to be the foundation of my show, because it elicited such strong feelings from people. Trying to undo that tense reaction would amount to something more substantial, interesting, and risky. If you aren’t risking anything then you just shouldn’t make an hour. To that end I hope the show can still lose people.
Can you tell me a little bit about Touch Me Not, what can fringe audiences expect?
It’s about how coming to faith as an adult has made me confront, embrace, and celebrate my queerness, and really the inherent queerness of life itself. I tell this story of acceptance through the Parable of the Prodigal Son because it’s well structured and copyright free. You can expect a healthy blend of the divine and the profane. It is both an earnest love letter to the power of faith and deeply offensive to a lot of Christians.
"The major changes have been to simplify, restructure, and make accessible the themes of both faith and queerness."
Do you think audiences will be surprised that for someone who grew up queer would find community in church?
Yeah of course. Culturally they are positioned at loggerheads. You can be one or the other, and if you’re one, you probably hate the other - that’s our prevailing and sweeping assumption of how queerness and Christianity relate. What I have learned through coming to faith is that all of us, of all faiths and none, queer and not, have been subject to a horrific form of spiritual abuse. Religious institutions have made the hatred of queerness inextricable from our ideas and experience of God - whether or not we ‘believe’ or are part of a faith community. Many other groups and individual people of all walks of life have been made to feel the same way - that God hates us. But what I have discovered in an inclusive faith community, and in reading scripture, is that the Christian faith and religious texts are really fucking queer. The love story of David and Jonathan in Samuel 1+2, Ruth and Naomi’s quite sapphic relationship, Psalm 139’s proclamation that we are all ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ and ‘intricately woven in the depths of the earth’ by a loving creator - also Christ’s lamentation of Jerusalem, his desire to take it under his wings like a ‘mother hen’ - there is such tremendous sexual and gender fluidity in the Bible that is buried by the countless bigots who try to cast faith as something that cannot be all of ours.
Had you always planned to create your debut hour from such a personal place?
No. I thought it would be way more observational than this because my biggest influences when I started standup were comics like Sebastian Maniscalco, Rodney Dangerfield, Brian Regan - mega observational Yanks. My act became increasingly confessional over the last couple of years and I also think the best Fringe hours are very personal, it’s just what suits this particular genre of standup hour best. I have learned to love it, but I have also formed my sense of self through standup, because I am braver on stage than real life, so comedy was always going to force my hand and make me overshare for this show.
How have your WIPs been going, during your run up to the festival have there been any major changes to Touch Me Not?
They were fucking terrible to start with to be honest. Genuinely really bad, struggling to get words out even, because the Christian stuff was way too focused on abstract theological ideas rather than lived experience, and I wanted to iron that all out before getting on with more reliable material. The major changes have been to simplify, restructure, and make accessible the themes of both faith and queerness. I think both of these things inform the way everyone lives, so I’m just hoping that that comes across, rather than seeming like ‘this is a unique experience I’ve had’ - so the changes have been to let people in and realise that this kind of experience is actually universal.
I guess this might be a question better asked at the end of your fringe run, since creating and performing Touch Me Not in the build up to the festival what would you say you’ve discovered about yourself that you previously might not have known?
That I can actually do an hour of standup, to be honest. That still seems crazy to me. It’s such a long time! Also, that something as simple as choice of words can actually create a genuinely mystical feeling in a comedy show.
And being super reflective what would you say to that younger, queer self?
Being attracted to all sorts of people and having one boob/gender dysphoria isn’t that deep mate. Also you need Jesus
What does Touch Me Not say about you and the type of comedy you want to create?
I think it sets my stall out as someone who wants to make standup that is strange, not alternative in its presentation but bizarre in its content.
How do you unwind after a show?
Nutella and Instagram reels.
Where did your passion for comedy come from?
I did an experimental theatre degree in Brighton and no one had tried doing standup yet. I’d grown up on panel shows and Live at The Apollo etc but I hadn’t watched loads of standup.
However I had been sent out of a lot of classrooms in senior school for laughing too much at my friends, and I loved the feeling of laughing. I also had very low self esteem when I tried standup. The passion for it actually arose from having the chance to ‘win’ interactions with people - if they laugh even once they’ve liked me for a moment, is what I thought.
What was your first time like out on stage?
I was 8 cans of Carling deep and it felt euphoric, I cried after. It was a terrible set of course. In your first gig if you just get slight giggles it is one of the purest highs a person can experience. I knew I’d found something that could give me a lot. I’m glad I’m sober now.
Sell Touch Me Not in three words (no hyphens).
Witness Heresy, Live!
And finally, what message would you like your audiences to take with them from Touch Me Not?
That we are here to love and be loved in return.