Three weekends instead of two

Russell Howard opens the Music Hall on Saturday 19 September with a show called “Don’t Tell the Algorithm”. It’s the kind of title only a comic who came up through Mock the Week could land without a visible wince. He’s the curtain-raiser for a festival that has quietly grown from two weekends to three for 2026, after a 2025 run that put 16,000 tickets across 40 gigs into a fortnight. The 2026 dates are Saturday 19 September to Sunday 4 October.

Sharon Burgess, CEO of Aberdeen Performing Arts, told Chortle why the third weekend exists:

We had such a great response to our late-night gigs and family shows at the Lemon Tree in 2025 that this year we’ve expanded on both of those, featuring some of the sharpest and funniest up-and-coming comics.

Both of those, the after-11 mixed bill and the kid-friendly daytime stuff, are the strands regional festivals usually trim first when budgets tighten. Aberdeen has added shows to both, with the Lemon Tree carrying most of the new late-night load.

What the headline weekends actually look like

The Music Hall side of the brochure is the easy part. Howard on the 19th, Susan Calman with “Tall Tales” on the 25th, Connor Burns with “Flow” on 2 October, Larry Dean with “Hellbent” on the 3rd. Maisie Adam takes “Whatsherface” to the Tivoli. The Lemon Tree gets the more interesting bookings: Fred MacAulay (a fixture of the Scottish circuit), Mark Thomas, Janet Street-Porter in a show literally titled “Is Still Off the Leash at 80”, and a work-in-progress slot for Shaparak Khorsandi. Alexandra Haddow, Grace Campbell and Ted Hill round that strand out.

John Kearns brings “Tilting at Windmills”, his first new touring hour in a while, to the Lemon Tree on 29 September, and Laura Lexx plays “Yo-Yo” there on 3 October. Both of those names landed in the festival’s earlier 2026 announcement, the one Beyond the Joke ran last autumn. Killian Sundermann is also on the Lemon Tree bill, which is more restraint with the streaming-clip-led talent pool than most regional festivals are showing right now.

Three clean weeks after Edinburgh closes

Aberdeen’s late-September slot is the cleverest thing about the programme. Edinburgh wraps in late August and the autumn touring circuit doesn’t really kick in until mid-October, which leaves comics with a Fringe hour ready to road-test in a regional room a clean three-week window to play it cold. The Lemon Tree is the size of room where a work-in-progress sells like an actual gig.

Adrian Watson, CEO of Aberdeen Inspired, the business improvement district partner that helps fund the festival, put it more chamber-of-commerce in 2025: “The success of the Aberdeen Comedy Festival is something that should put a smile on the face of everyone in the Granite City.” Read past the granite-themed wordplay and what he’s actually saying is that the festival is a hotel-bed generator. The push to a third weekend in 2026 is presumably as much about September restaurant covers as it is about new-hour bookings. Comparable city-centre cluster thinking made the Rik Mayall festival sell out before year two even opened.

Late-night, kids’ shows, and what nobody else covers

The family programming nobody else writes about: Balloonatic, Comedy Club 4 Kids, and Ted Hill Teaches You Science, Most of Which is True. The Ted Hill show is the one I’d actually drag my own kid to (the bar to clear there is admittedly low). Comedy Club 4 Kids was a confirmed sellout in 2025, per the Beyond the Joke recap. Late Night at the Lemon Tree is the strand the Burgess quote was specifically about: mixed bills that let touring acts who haven’t sold their own room split a bar take with three other comics they like drinking with.

Breakneck Comedy Club, Aberdeen’s actual working club venue rather than an Aberdeen Performing Arts space, gets Al Thompson, Shazia Mirza and Rab Mulheron under the festival umbrella. Worth mentioning because every festival this size has a tension between the producing organisation’s own rooms and the local independents. Aberdeen seems to have negotiated that one without anyone getting cut out.

The booking grammar across festivals of this scale is converging fast: one big-name opener, a curated mid-tier hour-show strand, and a late-night portmanteau for everyone else. If you want a comparison point for how a smaller-city institution treats its support acts, Gilded Balloon’s £2,000 grants to five Fringe shows is the same week’s worth of small-festival generosity from a much bigger building. Simon Amstell’s two-night McEwan Hall run goes the opposite direction: one act, one room, two nights’ worth of conversation.

What’s not in the announcement

Three things I’d want to know that aren’t in the release: the total show count (2025 hit 40 across two weeks; the 16-day 2026 version should clear that, but Aberdeen Performing Arts isn’t saying), top-line ticket pricing, and whether the family programming is being subsidised by the late-night bar take or the other way round. I’ve asked. If anyone from APA wants to call back, I’m here.

The other obvious gap: no headline name from outside the UK and Ireland, and no act on the bill with the kind of arena-tour pull that drops a festival into the national press week-after-week. Howard and Calman are the closest. What the festival has clearly decided it wants to be in 2026 is a three-weekend container of solid mid-tier hour-shows, with no single outsized headliner doing the heavy lifting. The first of the late-night Lemon Tree bills goes up on the Friday of week one, lineup still to be confirmed.

Sources