Engaged at the Fringe: a comedy show that ended in a yes
She thought she was watching a stand-up set. She wasn't.
Ross Kennedy had been planning the proposal for four months, but he hadn't planned on doing it in front of three hundred strangers at the Edinburgh Fringe. 'The comedian was called Struan Logan, and Ross had messaged him on Instagram back in June asking if he'd help,' says Amy Sutherland, laughing at the memory. 'I had no idea any of this was happening.'
The pair had been dating for three years, both Edinburgh natives who'd never quite got round to a summer at the Fringe together despite living five minutes from the Pleasance. Ross booked tickets to a late-night show at the Underbelly on Cowgate, told Amy it was a birthday treat for his flatmate, and sat two rows from the front. August in Edinburgh is a strange, thrilling month to live through as a local — the city fills with a million extra visitors, every close and courtyard becomes a venue, and the ordinary rhythms of work and home life bend around the festival entirely. For a couple who'd grown up watching that transformation from the outside, choosing to make it the backdrop for something this personal felt inevitable rather than dramatic.
The set-up
Halfway through his routine, Struan Logan paused, told the crowd he needed a volunteer for a bit about 'terrible first dates', and called Amy up onto the stage. What followed was five minutes of gentle mockery about long-term relationships that ended with him producing a small black box from his jacket pocket and handing it, not to Amy, but to Ross, who had quietly walked up the side aisle. The timing had taken weeks to choreograph over increasingly elaborate voice notes, with Ross feeding Struan details about how he and Amy met so the material could be woven convincingly into a set the comedian had already been performing for three weeks of the run.
- The whole exchange was filmed by Amy's sister from the third row
- The ring, a vintage-style oval sapphire, had been chosen with help from Amy's mum
- The audience gave a standing ovation before the interval
- Struan Logan still mentions the proposal in his set two years later
Why the Fringe felt right
'Edinburgh in August is basically our whole relationship in one place,' Ross says. 'We met at a Fringe show in 2019, so it felt right to ask her at one too, even if it meant enlisting a comedian I'd never actually met before that week.' There's something particular about proposing inside a show rather than at a viewpoint or a restaurant table — it hands the moment over to an audience of strangers who become, briefly, part of the story, and it means the couple will never be able to watch a Fringe show again without a small flicker of nerves.
What came next
They're marrying next summer at a castle hotel, just south of the city, with a ceremony booked for late August so the wedding week overlaps, deliberately, with the last weekend of the Fringe. Amy says she still can't watch stand-up without half-expecting someone to propose to a stranger. 'Every comedian who calls someone up now, I panic a little on their behalf.' The couple have already asked their humanist celebrant to work a line about the venue into the ceremony, and Ross has half-joked about seeing whether Struan would be free to compere the evening reception, though Amy insists that particular favour is where she's drawing the line.
For a city that hosts thousands of festival love stories every August, most of which never make it past a single fringe fling, theirs is the kind that locals like to tell each other over a pint in October once the crowds have gone home and Edinburgh belongs to Edinburgh again. It is, as Amy puts it, proof that sometimes the most romantic thing a person can do is nothing at all — just sit two rows from the front and wait to be called up.