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 new world of AI slop design we wanted to sponsor the craft, creativity and comedy that goes into selling shows at the best comedy festival in the world,” said Serious About Funny Business, a marketing consultancy. It has taken on sponsorship of the 2026 Comedy Poster Awards and stumped up a £1,000 prize fund. Last August the audience winner walked away with a full-page advert in a Fringe magazine, 5,000 A6 flyers and 100 A3 posters. This year there is actual cash.

That phrase, “AI slop”, didn’t start with a marketing consultancy. It’s been sitting on a Change.org petition since January, aimed squarely at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme. When I checked it on 3 September it had 806 verified signatures against a target of 1,000. Eight months, and it still hasn’t hit a number you could fill in the Pleasance Courtyard on a wet Tuesday.

Last year the audience winner got 5,000 flyers

The 2025 awards went to two shows. The credit lists are worth reading, because they show how many people touch a single Fringe image. Alison Spittle’s Big took the Audience Award with a poster designed by Oliver Deans. Photography was by Matt Stronge, make-up by Phoebe Dawson Derry. The Panel Award went to Jessica Aszkenasy’s Titclown, designed by Dylan Woodley with photography by Rebecca Need-Menear. Four names, two posters, and Chortle listed every one of them, which is more than most award write-ups manage.

The prize itself, though, was print. A full-page advert in 247 Fringe, 5,000 A6 flyers and 100 A3 posters. All of it genuinely useful, and all of it essentially more of the thing you already paid to design. It sits neatly alongside the Birmingham award that pays its winner in a mug. The Comedians’ Choice went the same way: Kate Dolan won £500 of PR and no cash. Awards founder Gina Lyons set the thing up in 2014 through Gobby Girl Productions, and she seems aware of the difference. “We’re thrilled to have Serious About Funny Business supporting the awards this year and putting a proper cash prize behind the creativity,” she told Beyond The Joke. The word doing the work in that sentence is “proper”.

What I can’t tell you, and I tried, is how the £1,000 splits between the two categories. Nor whether the money lands with the designer or the comic who commissioned them. The British Comedy Guide pages that host the awards returned a 403 to me four times running. That’s either a bot filter or a very committed one. UK comedians reported average earnings of £21,143 last year. A four-figure design credit matters a great deal to whoever actually banks it, and Lyons is the only person who can say which of the two that is.

How do you enter the Comedy Poster Awards?

Entries are open now and close on 13 September 2026, via the awards’ page at comedy.co.uk/posters. Two categories share the £1,000: an Audience Award decided by public vote and a Panel Award chosen by industry judges. This is the tenth edition. The awards describe their remit as the designers, photographers, artists and comedians who turn a show idea into an image. You don’t have to be the performer to be in it.

One wrinkle worth flagging if you’re planning to enter late. Chortle’s write-up says you can enter by 13 September; Beyond The Joke’s says voting closes at 23:59 on Sunday 13 September. Both point at the same night, which means entries are still arriving while voting is already under way. If your poster goes up on the 12th it’s competing against artwork that has been collecting votes for a fortnight. Last year the awards drew more than 200 posters and more than 15,000 public votes, so a late entry is joining a queue several hundred images deep.

As someone who has stood in Bristo Square watching a bloke laminate a poster in the rain, I’d add one thing. The audience vote at any Fringe award is partly a measure of how loud your mailing list is. I don’t hold that against the awards – it’s roughly why the Panel Award is there, judged by people who have never been on anyone’s mailing list.

The petition got 806 names and the Fringe said no

Luke Oseland, who started the Change.org petition and writes in it as a performer rather than a punter, put the case plainly:

We dedicate an immense amount of time working on our graphic design and our ad-copy. Seeing that people have cut corners and had both designed entirely artificially, without so much as a proofread, is awful.

His sharper point is further down, and it’s about volume rather than taste. He writes that he could create ten new shows, graphics, titles and marketing materials at the click of a button, register them, and dilute a pool of productions people have put their lives into. With 1,401 comedy shows in the 2026 programme, someone with a bit of capital and no shame could do exactly that by Tuesday afternoon.

The Fringe Society isn’t biting. Deadline News reported in January that a spokesperson said the organisation must remain impartial and isn’t in the business of policing how shows are marketed. The spokesperson also noted that AI tools might be a cost-effective option for artists who see marketing as admin that eats into creative time. [The Deadline News page returned a 403 when I tried to open it directly, so that position is reported here as summarised rather than quoted.] You can see the logic, and you can also see why a comic who just paid a photographer, a designer and a make-up artist for one A3 image might find it a bit rich. Especially in a festival that sold 2.8 million tickets this year and still leaves most acts out of pocket.

Which is what makes a £1,000 poster prize slightly more interesting than a £1,000 poster prize normally is. An award can’t ban anything, and it certainly can’t check whether the winning image came out of a studio or a prompt box. I’ve seen nothing suggesting the organisers intend to try. What it can do is put money next to the credit list. Last year’s had four human names on it before you even got to the comedian, make-up artist included.

The other thing worth watching is whether the sponsor comes back in 2027. Marketing consultancies discover comedy roughly once a year, usually in August. The ones that stick around are the ones whose founder has done an open mic and never quite recovered. Serious About Funny Business runs a newsletter and live events, which suggests they might. Ask me on 14 September, when we’ll know how many posters went in and whether anyone dared enter something with six fingers on it.

Sources

• Chortle – Entries open for 2026 Comedy Poster Awards
• Beyond The Joke – Voting Opens For The Comedy Poster Awards, Now With New Sponsor
• Chortle – Who won the 2025 Comedy Poster Awards
• Change.org – Ban the use of AI from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Programme
• Deadline News – Calls for ‘laughable’ AI use to be banned in Edinburgh Fringe programme
• British Comedy Guide – poster award entries page