ISH Awards Prize Fund Hits £17,600.01 After Starr Gift

The hundred quid only exists if you’re standing in the room

There’s a £100 note with your name on it at the Counting House on Friday night. The only way to get it is to be there at half eleven when they say your name. Chortle reported on 25 August that Garry Starr has donated £1,600 to the prize fund of the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards. The terms are unusually blunt for a comedy award: “It means every act nominated for best show and best newcomer will receive £100 – but on condition they attend the ceremony on Friday night to pick up their money.” That takes the fund to £17,600.01, up from the £16,000.01 the ISH awards announced earlier this month.

Beyond the Joke put the ceremony at 11.30pm on Friday 28 August at the Counting House. Worth checking that time against your own diary before you book the train home. The Fringe runs to 31 August this year, so the last Friday is not the last night. Acts with a Saturday show are still in town. The Counting House will already have had a comedy crowd through it that evening. Paul Currie’s REMOVE YOUR SKIN PLEASE, which is on the best show longlist, plays Free Festival @ Counting House at 20:30. Somebody is mopping between those two things.

Starr’s stated reasoning, via Chortle, does not pretend to be a policy intervention:

I love the ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards and thought – how can I back them? With something silly like this. Awards are lovely and silly and let’s reward the lovely and silly.

Awards founder Nathan Cassidy replied in kind: “Garry Starr is a total inspiration, and to have such an incredible performer and beautiful human being backing us is utterly tremendous.” There’s also an extra £100 for a show that wasn’t on the longlists at all, formally titled the Garry Starr Very Very Silly and Not-Longlisted Prize. It’s the first Fringe award I’ve seen that pays you for being overlooked.

How much do the ISH awards pay in 2026?

The total prize fund is £17,600.01. Before Starr’s donation the breakdown, per Beyond the Joke, was Best Show £5,000, Best Newcomer £4,000 and Panel Prize £5,000. Joke of the Fringe took £1,000.01 and the Award for Best Tech £1,000. Chortle’s longlist story names the money behind two of those. Its wording: “Best Show carries a £5,000 prize, thanks to sponsorship from Romesh Ranganathan; best newcomer is £4,000, courtesy of Sarah Millican.” The tech award is backed by Elf Lyons and the joke prize by Takeover Radio 106.9FM – the joke prize being where that stray penny on the end of the total comes from, and I have never had a straight answer out of anyone about why it’s there. James Corden, Rhod Gilbert and new sponsor Mark Silcox are also on the list.

For scale, Audible’s £10,000 top prize at the official Edinburgh Comedy Awards is still the biggest single cheque in the city. The Comedians’ Choice Awards pay their winners in rehearsal time and a PR package. The ISH awards are run by volunteers, with the sponsorship going into prize money rather than into a ceremony budget. Roughly 30 volunteer judges compile the lists. Producer Sarah Bowles told Beyond the Joke: “Putting together a long-list is always slightly mad because, by this point in the Fringe, everyone has seen so much comedy that their heads are full of it.”

The man funding the nominee fee isn’t on the longlist

Garry Starr is the creation of Australian comedian Damien Warren-Smith. This year’s show is Classic Penguins at the Pleasance Grand, running 5 to 30 August at 9.30pm according to his producers Francesca Moody Productions. Neither Starr nor Warren-Smith appears on either ISH longlist published by Chortle on 21 August. So the money for the nominee handshake is coming from a man who won’t be collecting one. That’s either very generous or an elaborate way of buying yourself a category.

£1,600 out of one act’s own pocket is a serious number in the context of what a Fringe run costs. Only 16 of 402 applicants got a £2,500 Keep It Fringe grant this year. The average UK comedian earned £21,143 in 2025, down £5,635 on the year before. The donation is the size of two thirds of a Keep It Fringe grant, paid out in hundreds to people the donor is not competing with.

What £1,600 actually divides into

Here’s the arithmetic, and it’s mine rather than the awards’: £1,600 buys sixteen £100 payments. One of those is earmarked for the Not-Longlisted Prize. That leaves fifteen, a decent guess at the combined size of the two shortlists announced on Wednesday 26 August. Nominees for the tech award and the joke prize come the same day. It cannot be the longlists: there are 60 acts on those (39 for best show, 21 for best newcomer). Sixty hundreds would come to £6,000.

Nobody has said out loud what happens to the acts shortlisted on the Wednesday who then have a flight, a tour date or a Saturday morning. Any of those makes 11.30pm on the Friday impossible. Nobody is going to lose a career over £100. But if you’re an act on a Free Festival split doing 40 seats a night at the Pear Tree, £100 is a fortnight of flyers or a chunk of the train home. Chortle’s wording leaves no wiggle room on how you collect it – be in the room on Friday night, or the hundred stays in the pot.

The longlist itself is a reasonable map of where the ISH awards judges spent August. Monkey Barrel appears more than a dozen times, alongside Pleasance, Underbelly, Assembly, Gilded Balloon, The Stand, Hoots, PBH and Free Festival rooms. Jason Byrne is on it for 30 Years Byrning at the Assembly Hall at 19:10. So is Sofie Hagen at Monkey Barrel at 15.20, and Kate Cheka at the Voodoo Rooms at 17:55. Whoever ends up winning the Very Very Silly and Not-Longlisted Prize will presumably have to be told, at some point on Friday, that they have won something they were not in the running for. Then they have to be awake at half eleven to take the cash.

Sources

About River Leanox

River Leanox edits Open Comedy's newsroom. Coverage runs across stand-up's full ecosystem: comics on the rise, club owners booking the rooms, festivals, specials, and the working-comic economics behind the laughs. Tips, corrections, and counter-arguments welcome at river@opencomedy.com.

View all posts

Garry Starr puts £1,600 in so every ISH nominee gets £100