12 Jun
07:09
Sarah Millican puts £4,000 into the Edinburgh newcomer prize
Sarah Millican won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards best newcomer prize in 2008 and used the money to pay off her car loan. Eighteen years on…
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
11 Jun
15:17
Live Comedy Association tells fans to email MPs about a £1bn sector
The Live Comedy Association reckons the UK’s live comedy sector is worth more than a billion pounds a year. This week it asked you, personally,…
6 Jun
05:56
Brighton Fringe gave 386 comedies just two awards this year
Brighton Fringe ran 386 comedy shows across May and handed out exactly two comedy awards for them – one audience vote, one judged. The audience…
5 Jun
09:12
Leicester Comedy Festival axes Abbey Park gig, keeps the £3 fees
Sunday 14 June was meant to be Lou Sanders, Phil Ellis, Tom Rosenthal, Kiri Pritchard McLean and Nabil Abdulrashid on a stage in Abbey Park…
4 Jun
10:47
Frankie Boyle’s company is sitting on £4.24m
Frankie Boyle’s comedy company, McShane Karate Limited, was sitting on £4,244,000 in shareholder funds at the end of August 2025. That’s the figure on the…
4 Jun
04:10
Jon Petrie leaves the BBC for Hat Trick in August
“A fairly brutal reminder of my age” That’s Jon Petrie, the BBC’s outgoing director of comedy. He’s reacting to taking the creative director job at…
1 Jun
01:19
Matt Hollins wins the £150 comedy prize 100 over-35s entered
The trophy is a pigeon, the prize was £150, and the qualifying rule is that you can’t be a professional. That is the Not So…
31 May
01:36
Aberdeen Comedy Festival 2026 stretches to three weekends
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…
30 May
07:41
Gilded Balloon hands £2,000 each to five Fringe shows
£2,000. That’s what each of the five shows on the inaugural Gilded Balloon Show Support Fund will get this August. Tim Minchin and his wife…
29 May
12:11
Ania Magliano gets the Rose d’Or gig at Kings Place
The Rose d’Or press release dropped on 13 May with a sentence I genuinely had to read twice. Ania Magliano was asked why she’d taken…
