The announcement landed with the words “official snack partner” doing a lot of early work. There is a £1,000 prize attached, an Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society endorsement, and a sentence from Cheez-It’s senior marketing manager Rui Frias about wanting to “make every moment at the Fringe just a little bit cheesier.” The Joke of the Fringe is back, sponsored by a baked cracker that most British supermarket shoppers couldn’t pick out of a lineup.

The new contest, reported by Chortle on 18 May, fills the gap left by the end of the original award. UKTV’s Dave dropped the Joke of the Fringe in 2024 after eighteen years, during which the broadcaster reliably harvested acres of newspaper coverage from running the list of top punchlines. The format itself is unchanged: comedians submit jokes, a panel of comedy experts narrows the field to a top five at the start of the festival, then the public votes. The winner gets a grand. As Chortle noted, the details of how to apply have not yet been announced.

The Society is putting its name to this one

The piece of the announcement worth pausing on is the Fringe Society’s role. This is being launched alongside Cheez-It’s confirmation as “official snack partner” of the Fringe — and the brand isn’t arriving cold. It previously helped raise £10,000 for the Keep it Fringe fund, which supports Edinburgh-bound performers, with 25p from every 40g bag sold in Co-ops going toward the initiative.

The Society’s chief executive, Tony Lankester, leaned into the obvious gag rather than away from it:

I was tempted to make my own cheesy jokes here — you wouldn’t brie-lieve it, gouda on them, that sort of thing — but on second thoughts I think I’ll leave that to the professionals. Suffice it to say I’m so thrilled to have Cheez-It on board as the official snack partner of the Fringe.

Tony Lankester, CEO, Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, speaking to Chortle

Lankester went on to describe the contest as “another way to give Fringe artists cash and exposure when they need it most.” That clause is the bit working comics will read twice. “Cash and exposure when they need it most” lands a particular way in a year when Fringe economics have been under the microscope, and a fortnight after Leicester Comedy Festival admitted it was paying 78 per cent of acts late or not at all. A grand of brand money for one gag isn’t nothing in that context, even if nobody is calling it a fee.

The contest is not walking onto an empty stage

The Cheez-It prize is not the only Joke of the Fringe in town. Per Chortle, four alternative competitions sprang up to fill the vacuum after Dave’s withdrawal, and all four are returning in 2025.

The ISH Edinburgh Comedy Awards run their own Joke of the Fringe category — and, contrary to the “no money behind them” framing it would be easy to reach for, it is sponsored, by Nottinghamshire’s Takeover Radio, and carries a £500.01 prize. Last year that went to Jo Caulfield. Comic Will Mars runs the “(Some Guy Called) Dave Joke of the Fringe,” in which a random bloke named Dave picks his favourite from an industry-drawn shortlist to win £500, backed by a daily showcase at The Three Sisters; Andy Gleeks took the 2025 title. The UK Pun Off hands out a joke of the Fringe award judged partly on audience reaction at its shows at Bar 50, won last year by Eliott Simpson. And the tongue-in-cheek Pegasus Comedy Awards — “proud to be the most pointless awards in comedy” — give a “Joke Of A Fringe” title with a grand prize of 1p, claimed in 2025 by Tom Mayhew.

So £1,000 is, set against the field, twice the Will Mars and ISH prizes and a great deal more than a single penny. What it actually buys is positioning: a Society-endorsed contest is the one that drifts to the top of search rankings, press coverage and the BBC’s annual sixty-second compilation video, while the rival prizes scrap for the attention that’s left.

What a snack brand buys for a thousand quid

For a top-five act, the £1,000 is almost incidental. The real prize is the clip: a place on a circulated list means the BBC compilation, two months of agents’ emails, and a measurable bump to the next tour announcement. For the brand, the trade runs the other way — tens of thousands of free national-news impressions every time the list goes round, against a sponsorship fee the Society banks toward its own costs.

What the contest can’t fix is the structural problem with one-liner awards. Dave’s version drifted away from the shows the jokes came from, the same handful of pun comics got very good at gaming the format, and the segment stopped reliably driving tune-in. None of that changes because a cracker is on the headline instead of a TV channel.

A quick word about the cracker

For UK readers: Cheez-It is an American cheese-flavoured cracker made by Kellanova — the snack arm spun off from the Kellogg Company. Per Chortle, Kellanova was itself bought by Mars for $36 billion in December, after clearing an EU monopolies investigation. The cracker has been notionally available in British supermarkets for a relatively short while and is, in this writer’s experience, mostly bought by people who got a recommendation from someone who visited Florida.

Sponsoring a Fringe joke prize tells you what tier of cultural recognition the brand is targeting: not the broadsheet weekenders, but the “quotable in a Time Out roundup” slot. The thing to watch is whether the Society-backed version starves the rival prizes of oxygen — and whether, if a winning joke ever goes properly viral, Cheez-It still considers a grand the right number. With Mars now behind Kellanova, the marketing budget that £1,000 comes out of is a rounding error.

Submission details, as Chortle dryly noted, have not yet been announced. The 2026 Fringe runs from 1 to 25 August, which leaves comics with a shortlist-worthy one-liner roughly eleven weeks to find out where to send it.

Sources