9 Sep
15:41
Mrs Brown’s Boys won its sixth NTA because it toured first
Amanda Holden sang at Alan Carr and he cried Amanda Holden and Paloma Faith sang I Know Him So Well while Alan Carr collected his…
Reporter
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.
The running order
9 Sep
15:40
Ruby Wax cancels four dates, Sheffield gets 48 hours’ notice
A Thursday at the Memorial Hall, killed on the Tuesday Ticketmaster’s listing for An Evening with Ruby Wax at Sheffield City Hall Memorial Hall on…
8 Sep
08:23
UK comics are down to 2.5 gigs a week as 14 tours launch at once
Fourteen tours opened in one week and Chortle listed 6,112 events On Sunday 6 September, Daniel Kitson opened a tour called Thrum at the Junction…
8 Sep
08:22
Jamali Maddix gets the run of Hackney Empire’s 1,275 seats
The Hackney Empire holds 1,275 people. On Thursday 22 October it hands the lot of them over to a fictional pirate radio station from Brentford.…
6 Sep
20:47
BBC New Comedy Awards heats put 30 comics on six free Coventry shows
Thirty acts, six shows, and doors at six on a Tuesday Thirty comics will play six shows across three nights this month, in a shed…
6 Sep
12:55
Fringe says no to moving 2027, schools go back on 18 August
Susie McCabe had read the same press release as everyone else. “However, I would counter that with yes the front end of the Fringe was…
5 Sep
07:38
How to do crowd work without wrecking your own set
Jeff Arcuri’s crowd work started because he ran out of jokes at sea. “It really started when I started doing cruise ships,” he told A…
5 Sep
07:37
Banana Cabaret’s Balham room reopens at £20 with no lineup refunds
“Not sure why we didn’t have a compere,” Dave Vickers told Chortle in January. He was describing a booking habit that survived four decades in…
3 Sep
20:12
Fringe artist fund falls to £40,000 and comics top up the prizes
The Keep it Fringe fund paid 180 Edinburgh artists £2,500 each in 2025, a total of £450,000. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport put…
3 Sep
19:56
The Comedy Poster Awards finally pay in cash, not flyers
The firm putting money behind this year’s poster prize explained itself in a single sentence. It’s a sentence with a fight in it. “In a…
