Comedy News Filed 21 Sep 2026 · 16:48
Short Com 2026 Brings 53 Comedy Shorts to London
By River Leanox
Fifty-three selected comedy shorts are being squeezed into four London screenings this week. By the weekend, the audience will be watching them below deck on a ship built in 1913. Short Com opens at Peckhamplex on Wednesday 23 September before moving to Theatreship in Canary Wharf for Saturday and Sunday. This is a film and animation festival with an ambitious projector doing the heavy lifting. Its useful proposition for comics is unusually concrete: watch the work, meet the people making it and see what survives on a cinema screen.
The published selection contains 22 films from home-grown talent and 25 animations. The organiser says more than one third of the chosen films were directed by marginalised voices. Those figures describe the festival-wide programme. Nobody buying one ticket should expect all 53 films to sprint past before the house lights come up. Even short films need breathing room, especially the ones involving an irritable pigeon.
When and where is Short Com 2026?
Short Com 2026 runs in London from Wednesday 23 September to Sunday 27 September, opening with two Peckhamplex screenings before two weekend programmes at Theatreship. Peckhamplex lists the Wednesday performances at 18:00 and 20:15. The first is billed as Opening Screening, with a focus on home-grown work. The second is Comedy Fever, which the organiser describes as the wilder part of the selection.
Short Com, the festival organiser, puts the weekend move rather more cheerfully:
“Then on the 26th and 27th of September, we’re doing something we’ve never done before. Screening on a boat.”
The boat is Theatreship at South Quay Plaza in Canary Wharf, a converted 1913 vessel with a theatre, bar and exhibition space. Saturday 26 September combines Mixed Nuts, drawn from the live-action programme, with the animated Funimation selection. Sunday 27 September is Laugh Out PROUD, devoted to new comedy films by women and LGBTQ+ filmmakers. Both weekend dates also have separate networking sessions before the screenings. This is a kinder arrangement than asking somebody to explain their screenplay while the closing credits are rolling and everyone is hunting for a charging cable.
Tickets are on sale through the links on the festival programme. Peckhamplex states a £6.99 admission price plus a 60p per-ticket booking fee, taking the total to £7.59. The disclosed fee sits beside the face price, sparing buyers a small administrative ghost on the final payment screen. The live weekend booking pages should be checked for Theatreship prices. The festival listing says those tickets are currently offered at an early-bird rate but does not state the sum.
Fifty-three films and one nicotine-dependent dog
The attraction for a comic considering screen work is the range packed into the same festival. A stand-up clip normally has one blunt job. It must prove that the act can get laughs, preferably before a booker remembers the other 19 links in their inbox. Our guide to surviving a bomb on stage deals with another little endurance test. A narrative short has to introduce a world, characters and a reason to keep watching, then land the ending before the audience has finished adjusting its seat.
The Saturday listing offers a fairly honest warning about what that can look like. It mentions pigeons upsetting their neighbours, a transforming penguin and a badly behaved dog with a nicotine addiction. The published running order begins with Chris de Krijger’s Little Problems, Luke McQueen’s Nitpicker, James Button’s Time’s Up, I’m Afraid and Gertrūda Nemčauskaitė’s Backstreet Birds. The organiser also cautions that the lineup and running order may change, which is festival language for keeping your lovingly formatted spreadsheet in pencil.
Established names sit among the emerging filmmakers. Jerusha Hess, the co-writer of Napoleon Dynamite, directs Your Daughter Clytnyann; the programme also names Mr Inbetween director Nash Edgerton, while Thunder Road writer-director Jim Cummings appears in Disc. Their presence gives an audience three familiar handholds in a selection that leaves plenty of room for emerging filmmakers.
For comedians producing their own filmed work, the closest comparison in our recent coverage is Josephine Lacey self-funding a special at Top Secret. A short involves a different set of jobs, though the same awkward question arrives early: who pays before anybody knows whether the finished thing will travel? A festival screening supplies an audience and a credit, leaving the production budget, the train home and the meal somebody forgot to put on the call sheet for the filmmakers to cover.
One laurel does not make a BAFTA entry
Short Com appears on BAFTA’s published qualifying-festivals list for British Short Film. That status matters because it gives a selected filmmaker one recognised stop on the festival route. It should be described with care, however: the same BAFTA document says films submitted in the British Short Film category should have been accepted into at least two festivals on its list. Selection here alone does not automatically make a short eligible for the award.
BAFTA also warns that the qualifying list is continually updated and can change without notice. Filmmakers should therefore check the current rules when entering. A festival laurel on an old poster isn’t a permanent legal instrument. Laurels breed quickly around short films; by the ninth one, the title can resemble a garden centre receipt.
A film watched in a room reaches an audience beyond the three friends instructed to leave supportive comments online. The weekend networking sessions are aimed at filmmakers, comedians and other creatives, giving selected acts and writers a chance to meet before Mixed Nuts, Funimation and Laugh Out PROUD. Attendance by every listed filmmaker is not promised, and the organisers do not claim that one conversation produces a commission.
This route differs from direct commissioning, such as BBC Radio 4 commissioning 19 stand-ups and five pilots. A festival puts completed work in front of an audience and other makers. Anyone arriving with a half-written idea still has a half-written idea.
The immediate next step is pleasantly unromantic: choose one of the two Peckhamplex screenings, or follow the programme to Canary Wharf for the weekend sessions. By Sunday afternoon, somebody will probably be explaining an edit decision beside the bar on that converted 1913 vessel, while a fictional dog deals badly with nicotine on the screen below.
