Equity claws back pay for three unpaid Leicester festival comics
Three comedians paid, and a union that won’t name them Equity has got three comedians their money. That’s the concrete result out of the Leicester…
A new £1500 Fringe award for the acts risking it all
The Banneret Award will hand £1,500 to one Edinburgh Fringe act. Its criteria are unusually blunt about who qualifies: the performer for whom turning up…
Peter Kay’s four new Bolton shows are BL-postcode only
The instruction reads like a captcha with a chip on its shoulder: type your postcode in UPPER case, with a SPACE. Get it wrong and…
The £1,000 student award behind Lycett, Gamble and Gadd
The cheque at the end of the Chortle Student Comedy Award is £1,000, with £250 for the runner-up. The comedians who have stood roughly where…
Club Comedy Seattle closes July 15 after no buyer steps up
The last show at Club Comedy Seattle goes up on Wednesday. Once that room empties the lights stay off on a stage that spent five…
Learnmore Jonasi beats the $27m Lion King joke lawsuit
Learnmore Jonasi was on stage at the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles when he found out the news. A Grammy-winning composer wanted $27 million off…
Dublin comics win planning for a 200-seat Craic Den theatre
Eddie Mullarkey has spent years running comedy nights in rooms he doesn’t own. Now he’s got Dublin City Council’s blessing to build one, and he’s…
A Netflix boss will chair the Edinburgh Comedy Awards
The person who will chair the panel handing out the Fringe’s most career-making comedy prize this August has a day job. The rest of her…
Five Months On: A Hardship Fund for Leicester’s Unpaid Comedians, and the Festival’s Venue Is Gone
When we reported in May that 78 per cent of acts at the 2026 Leicester Comedy Festival had missed their 19 April settlement date, the…
LGBTQ+ New Comedian of the Year opens with a £1,000 prize
There’s one sentence in the entry rules for this year’s LGBTQ+ New Comedian of the Year that matters more than the rest. It will quietly…