Kate Dolan Wins Comedians' Choice Award 2026, No Cash

“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, I wasn’t even this happy on my wedding day,” Kate Dolan said on Wednesday afternoon at the Three Sisters. She had just won the one Fringe award that hands over no money whatsoever. Chortle reported the rest of her acceptance: “I’m so honoured, who knows more about comedy than comedians, and all men of course.”

We wrote about the Comedians’ Choice Awards and their unusual prize list when voting opened on 17 August. Now the votes are in. Win a peer vote at the world’s biggest arts festival and you walk away with a trophy, a rehearsal room and a favour from a publicist.

Who won the Comedians’ Choice Awards 2026?

Kate Dolan won best show for Trout and Marty Gleeson won best newcomer for Dog Ear. Best person went to Claire McCluskey, head of production at Monkey Barrel Comedy. The winners were revealed at 4.30pm on Wednesday 26 August at the Three Sisters, with Alison Spittle hosting. She won best show herself last year for BIG, a neat bit of succession planning for an award run on no budget.

Dolan’s show plays Monkey Barrel (MB2) until 30 August at 8.35pm, at £13.50 to £15.50 according to The Skinny’s listing. She’s represented by Avalon, and the Fringe programme files Trout under alternative comedy. Gleeson is at Pleasance Courtyard in Bunker One at 7.15pm, until 30 August (not 17 Aug), at £11.50 to £14.50. The Fringe listing for Dog Ear notes Gleeson is a BBC New Comedy Award finalist and won the Channel 4 Sean Lock Award in 2024, which is a fair pile of hardware to be carrying into a newcomer category.

A week of rehearsal room and £500 of PR

All three winners get a trophy. The best show and best newcomer winners also get a London transfer to the Bill Murray, a week of free rehearsal space and a preview show for their next Fringe run. On top of that, £500 towards a PR package with Flick Morris PR. The organisers spell out that winners aren’t obliged to accept the prizes and there is no cash alternative. I’ve never seen that sentence on a press release for any other kind of award, and I find it weirdly refreshing.

Do the sums against what an act has just spent. Dolan and Gleeson have both run a month at a paid venue. Even a modestly priced hour with a good crowd rarely clears the accommodation bill, once the flyering team, the poster print run and the PR retainer have taken their cut. Against that, the £500 PR contribution isn’t nothing, but it’s a contribution to a cost the winner has probably already incurred. It sits in roughly the same band as NextUp’s £500 and its 204cm inflatable trophy, and above the £100 Garry Starr put behind every ISH nominee. For context, the Live Comedy Association surveyed 272 people working in the sector and put average earnings at £21,143 across 2025.

The rehearsal week is the prize I’d actually take. A free room in London for seven days is worth more to a comic building next year’s hour than a cheque that goes straight onto the Fringe overdraft. Though obviously you can’t pay a train fare in rehearsal space.

The head of production got a trophy

The best person category exists for people who aren’t on stage – reviewers, producers, venue staff, anyone working in any capacity at the festival. This year it went to Claire McCluskey, who runs production at Monkey Barrel, the venue that has quietly become the address on half the Fringe’s award shortlists. Every one of the six Edinburgh Comedy Award nominees plays there or at Pleasance. Chortle quoted her acceptance in full:

I’m super grateful to everyone for voting for silly old me and I feel very lucky

That’s Claire McCluskey, head of production at Monkey Barrel Comedy, as reported by Chortle. She then credited the rest of her team, which is the correct answer. It’s also the one every tech op in Edinburgh has been waiting years to hear said out loud from a stage at four in the afternoon.

The category has form for this. Kyle Legacy took it in 2025. In 2024 it went to Alex Petty, co-founder and director of the Laughing Horse Free Festival, for the second time. His prize was a massage voucher. Unlike the two performer categories, no best person shortlist was published this year. So nobody spent a week refreshing a page hoping to see the name of the person who fixed their radio mic.

Nine shows, eleven newcomers, no panel

The mechanics: every comedy show at the Fringe can vote and can be voted for, with no judging panel and no industry specialists involved. The winners are chosen by fellow performers. The shortlists ran to nine shows for best show and eleven acts for best newcomer. Voting closed at 11.59pm on Tuesday 25 August, and the results landed the following afternoon. Barry Ferns founded the awards in 2014; they’re run with British Comedy Guide and Angel Comedy, whose own venue is the transfer prize.

Two names on those lists are worth flagging. Lady Bolognese appears on both shortlists at once, for Class War in best show and as a newcomer. That’s either a scheduling headache or a very good week. And Sam Eley made the newcomer shortlist here without winning it. That was days after he took NextUp’s Biggest Award in Comedy for Soul Sewage, performing as the papier-mâché character Basil Crumbwick. That prize was £500, the inflatable trophy and a recording of the show as a special. The same act, in the same fortnight, won one award and lost the other in front of a different set of voters. Elf Lyons, meanwhile, is back on the best show shortlist with The Woman on the Edge two years after winning the same category with Horses.

The other shortlisted shows were ‘Be Good!’ with Paulette, Dan Tiernan’s Quartz and All, Lara Ricote’s Inkling and Sid Singh’s Love Bombing. Also listed were Tom Short’s I Get ChatGPT To Write My Edinburgh Show and Underground Monk Show. The newcomer list also carried Ben McCarthy, Ethan & Gigi, Evaldas Karosas, Lawrence Dodd, Madeleine Brettingham, Paul Hilleard, Sapphire McIntosh and Zoe Wohlfeld.

Four days of the run left for both winners, and then the posters come down. The Fringe listing for Trout asks: “In 2026, is being a fish in the river nicer than a woman on land?” Nobody has yet asked whether it’s nicer than a week of free rehearsal space in London.

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.

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Kate Dolan wins the Comedians’ Choice and £500 of PR, no cash