Comic Masai Graham wins Dave's funniest joke of Edinburgh Festival Fringe for pasta pun

Comic Masai Graham has been awarded the best joke of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for his pun about pasta.

The English performer’s line: “I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta”, was judged as the funniest from a raft of selections.

It is the second time Graham has won the award, sponsored by television channel Dave, after previously scooping the prize in 2016.

On that occasion he won with: “My dad suggested I register for a donor card – he’s a man after my own heart.”

He said: “I was so delighted to find out I’d won the Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe award for a second time – I thought: ‘This is getting pasta joke.’”

It is the first time the award has been given out since 2019 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Dave’s top ten jokes of the Fringe in full:

1. Masai Graham: “I tried to steal spaghetti from the shop, but the female guard saw me and I couldn’t get pasta.”

2. Mark Simmons: “Did you know, if you get pregnant in the Amazon, it’s next-day delivery.”

3. Olaf Falafel: “My attempts to combine nitrous oxide and Oxo cubes made me a laughing stock.”

4. Hannah Fairweather: “By my age, my parents had a house and a family, and to be fair to me, so do I – but it is the same house and it is the same family.”

5. Will Mars: “I hate funerals – I’m not a mourning person.”

6. Olaf Falafel: “I spent the whole morning building a time machine, so that’s four hours of my life that I’m definitely getting back.”

7. Richard Pulsford: “I sent a food parcel to my first wife. FedEx.”

8. Tim Vine: “I used to live hand to mouth. Do you know what changed my life? Cutlery.”

9. Sophie Duker: “Don’t knock threesomes. Having a threesome is like hiring an intern to do all the jobs you hate.”

10. Will Duggan: “I can’t even be bothered to be apathetic these days.”