EdFringe Talk: Spooky Dookie: Cool New Planet!!

Posted in *EdFestivals 2026, *Written Interviews by

“We just love festivals and Edinburgh Fringe isn’t just a festival, it’s THE festival.”

WHO: Maureen Monahan

WHAT: “When? The dawn of time. Who? Two upstart planet designers pitching their idea for a brand new planet called Earth. Weaving together sketches, songs and improv, this show provides the audience a sneak peek at the exciting features of their proposed planet: rocks, cracks, pain, religion, microplastics, brand momentum and more. As sketch duo Spooky Dookie, Claire McFadden and Maureen Monahan have written and performed sketch shows all over America. Their combined credits include SNL, Jackbox Games, The Second City Mainstage, JFL Shorts, the Onion, Showtime, Comedy Central, Dropout and Good Mythical Morning.”

WHERE: Blether at Gilded Balloon Patter House (Venue 24) 

WHEN: 19:40 (60 min)

MORE: Click Here!

Is this your first time to Edinburgh?

Claire has been to Edinburgh Fringe before for a short run of improv shows, but has never performed the entire month. I have never been to Fringe and this will also be my first time in Scotland! I am Maureen, by the way. We’re a duo and I’m doing the typing while Claire stands over my shoulder feeding me answers and nodding encouragingly. We’ve been a sketch duo since 2016, and in that time we’ve performed in our fair share of comedy festivals big and small around the U.S. in Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, and Texas, but Edinburgh Fringe has always loomed large on our comedy bucket list. We love the festival lifestyle: seeing crazy, weird, unforgettable shows (cut to us having our minds blown by Natalie Palamides’s ‘Nate’ at SF SketchFest in 2019); meeting other performers; attempting to decipher an unfamiliar public transit system while lugging a bag of props. We just love festivals and Edinburgh Fringe isn’t just a festival, it’s THE festival. It has more of everything we love about festivals than any other festival. Plus, we both love looking at really old buildings, so Edinburgh is a dream.

What are the big things you’ve learned since 2025 and have you absorbed any of the lessons yet?

Speaking for both of us (Claire nodding encouragingly), we have learned a lot about how to navigate a long-distance comedy partnership. In September 2025, we put up our first full version of our show at Upright Citizens Brigade Los Angeles. The very next day, Claire learned she’d been hired to write for SNL and had to move to New York in less than a week! So after we were done celebrating and saying “Oh my god” to each other, we started to figure out how to embark on Edinburgh Fringe while remaining a “long distance” duo with a three hour time difference. We did a lot of FaceTime meetings to fine-tune the show and stretched our schedules so that we could fly back and forth to each other to perform it in New York and Los Angeles. The lesson? We are unstoppable. Resistance is futile. But also, It required a lot of patience and flexibility and in the process, we’ve built a show that we have so much fun doing, which is a big win for us, because we love fun.

Speaking for myself, (Maureen), I learned to play the ukulele. It’s not really a “big thing” as it’s a famously simple instrument and, if anything, more of a small guitar–but I did learn it. In our show we have a song that was once played on piano, but ukuleles are a lot easier to take to another country. So, I learned the song on ukulele and now I have calluses on the tips of my fingers, but my luggage will be a lot lighter.

Tell us about your show.

Like I mentioned, Claire and I have been writing and performing together as a sketch duo since 2016. We met in Chicago in the cast of a different, doomed ensemble sketch show and clung to each other in the wreckage. When we made our debut as a duo at a variety show at The Annoyance in Chicago, the host asked us what our name was and we answered “Spooky Dookie” in a panic. The name stuck because it’s kind of fun to have a stupid name. It’s a nice reminder that comedy is not serious.

Since then, we’ve written and performed six hour-long original sketch reviews, and Spooky Dookie: Cool New Planet!! is our seventh. We’ve also performed at many comedy festivals across the U.S., released an American History-themed comedy album we wrote during the pandemic (O, Petticoats! wherever you get music), and dressed up like drunk reindeer for a holiday concierge convention. All the while we cut our teeth in our separate paths in the comedy world, which would fling us into different cities for stretches of time. When we both were finally living in the same city (Los Angeles) again in 2025, we started writing the show that would become Cool New Planet!!. We concieved of the idea while out on a walk. We were making each other laugh with the way people talk when a friend is crashing out creatively and they’re trying to console them. Like your friend saying they accidentally created the concept of war and they feel horrible and having to tell them, “Oh my god, you’re catastrophizing. It’s so not a big deal.” We kept making each other laugh so much that a show grew out of it. We learned a lot of choreography on Claire’s back patio. We’ve put up the show at Upright Citizens’ Brigade and the Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, and at Union Hall in New York City, and we’re so excited to make our UK debut at Edinburgh Fringe.

What should your audience see at the festivals after they’ve seen your show?

We love our friends’ Drew Reilly and Ashley Leisten’s duo Megasquirt and are very excited to be astonished and disgusted by their show Megasquirt: Fully Loaded at Underbelly Cowgate. We are also very excited to see Alice Stanley’s play The Second Best School Shooting.

LIKE WHAT YOU JUST READ? FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! OR SIGN UP TO OUR MAILING LIST!

INTERESTED IN BEING INTERVIEWED TOO? CLICK HERE!