Bella Hull Lands SNL UK Writer Role at 28
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- Bella Hull, 28, has been named a writer on the new UK Saturday Night Live after a sell-out Edinburgh Fringe run last year with "Doctors Hate Her" and appearances on Have I Got News For You and The News Quiz.
- Hull says women in standup have roughly 10 seconds to make a room laugh compared with men's 30, recalling being told never to wear revealing clothes and being "horrendously heckled and wolf-whistled" on stage.
- Aged 21 and gigging in a remote part of England, Hull endured a famous older male comic making "consistent jokes about how they were going to rape me after the show" while the audience laughed, an environment she describes as the norm.
- Hull studied history of art at Cambridge, drawn by the Footlights comedy heritage, but gravitated to grittier club circuits, saying she was "obsessed with paying my dues" and rejecting peers with "golden boy syndrome."
- Her upcoming Edinburgh show "Mad Cow Disease" will be "very Emin-coded," drawing on influences from Tracey Emin and Ali Wong to cover eating disorders, mental health and yearning for a baby she calls "taboo for a female comedian."
- On SNL UK, Hull wrote Weekend Update dating correspondent Scrimpch, a "really sexual Italian man" performed by Ania Magliano, and a baggage-claim sketch with Aimee Lou Wood about a suitcase containing a bomb.
- One of Hull's social-media videos about a fashion disaster has 24.6 million views, though she says the pressure to "virtue signal" and "stand for something" pushes her toward riskier, more divisive material.
Why it matters: Hull's account of a famous male comic drawing audience laughs from jokes about raping her — labelled "the norm" — puts a mainstream spotlight on the culture inside certain UK club circuits just as she joins the writer's room of a flagship BBC sketch show, where she now shapes what reaches TV audiences.
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