Beyond the Fringe was a British comedy stage revue written and performed by Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Dudley Moore.

Bennett and Miller were already pursuing careers in academia and medicine respectively, but Cook had an agent, having written a West End revue for Kenneth Williams.

When the revue transferred to the Fortune Theatre in London, opening in early May 1961,[4] in a revised production by Donald Albery and William Donaldson and directed by Eleanor Fazan,[5] it became a true sensation.

The revue was widely considered to be ahead of its time, both in its unapologetic willingness to debunk figures of authority, and by virtue of its inherently surrealistic comedic vein.

Humiliation of authority was something only previously delved into in The Goon Show and, arguably, Hancock's Half Hour, with such parliamentarians as Sir Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan coming under special scrutiny—although the BBC were predisposed to frown upon it.

Macmillan—according to Cook—was not particularly fond of the slurred caricature and charade of senile forgetfulness (marked by a failure to pronounce 'Conservative Party' coherently) handed down on him in Cook's impersonation.

at a sketch he found distasteful, before apparently sitting down again and enjoying the remainder of the show, while another, at the first performance in Edinburgh, allegedly stood up and declared that the 'young bounders don't know the first thing about it!'

The show is credited with giving many other performers the courage to be satirical and more improvisational in their manner, and broke the conventions of not lampooning the Royal Family or the government of the day.

Slight changes were made to adapt the show for American audiences, for instance the opening number (discussing America) was retitled "Home Thoughts from Abroad".

The four original members of Beyond the Fringe feature prominently as characters in the play Pete and Dud: Come Again, by Chris Bartlett and Nick Awde.

Appropriately, that comedy-drama had a sellout run at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe before transferring to London's West End at The Venue, in 2006, in a version starring Kevin Bishop as Moore, Tom Goodman-Hill as Cook, Fergus Craig as Alan Bennett and Colin Hoult as Jonathan Miller.

In 2017, Beyond the Fringe was recreated for an episode of the Netflix TV series The Crown in which Prime Minister Macmillan is in attendance and singled out for abuse by Peter Cook (performed by Patrick Warner.)