UK Pun Off takes Leicester’s pun contest to 12 spots in a 50-seat bistro

Adam Ernest Pickard won the UK Pun Championships at the Leicester Comedy Festival in February. Chortle reported the title went his way at an event the festival had hosted annually since 2014. Next February’s knockout, according to Chortle’s report of 13 October, will be fought out in a 50-seater on Bond Street. There are 12 places in the entire tournament.

The wordplay contest survives, in other words, but under a different organiser and in a room a fraction of the size. Promoter Iain MacDonald, who Chortle says has been running the UK Pun Off for seven years, is the one picking it up. His contest “will be taking on the mantle for 2027”, in the same knockout format, at the Independent Comedy Festival on February 6. The charity that ran the old festival went under over the summer. That 13 October report says the collapse left the future of the competition in doubt, along with more than £215,000 in unpaid bills. We’ve already gone through the liquidation filing and the two rival February programmes, so I’ll leave the numbers there.

Twelve spots, and applications opened on 14 October

If you’ve entered the pun contest before, the change that matters is how narrow the door has got. Chortle, writing on 13 October, said applications for the 12 tournament spots would go live the following day, which makes it 14 October 2026. Everything else in this story is paperwork and liquidators.

Neither the entry fee for the 2027 UK Pun Off nor a closing date for applications appears in any report I can find. That’s worth saying plainly rather than guessing at it. Twelve spots is a small door, though. The people who tend to get through doors like that are the ones who had the material filed before the announcement. Darren Walsh, Masai Graham and Adele Cliff are among the past winners Chortle lists from the Leicester era. Those aren’t names you beat with a pun you wrote on the train. If you’re building a knockout set from scratch this autumn, our piece on surviving the five-minute rule covers the structural stuff. The pun format works differently, since you’re judged line by line, and I’ve watched a comic lose a round because the audience laughed at the wrong word in a three-word gag.

Where is the 2027 UK Pun Off being held?

At James Bistro on Bond Street in Leicester, a 50-seater, on February 6, as part of the Independent Comedy Festival. Chortle’s report is explicit that this replaces De Montfort Hall as the venue. The festival’s own take-part page lists the whole programme running in Leicester from 3 to 21 February 2027.

Fifty seats does more to the gig than it does to the gate. Every single person in the room is inside heckling range of the microphone. For a pun contest that is either the entire charm or the thing that eats your timing. And a bistro is a working kitchen with a show in it, which the press line doesn’t dwell on. The pacing of a knockout with 12 competitors is a different negotiation when the room has covers to turn, because 12 competitors is a lot of rounds to get through while somebody’s main course goes cold.

What the new festival charges to register a show

Acts weighing up a run at the replacement festival, rather than just the pun night, have a number to work with. Chortle reported on 21 September that registration fees come in 20 per cent cheaper than the old festival’s. For reference on what that’s measured against, Chortle’s April report put the collapsed festival’s upfront registration at £72 for the smallest room.

The festival’s take-part page sets out a discount structure for acts putting on more than one performance of a show they produced themselves. That’s £10 off the first performance and a further £20 off the second. It also gives a registration deadline of 11.59pm on Friday 9 October. That’s described as the deadline for the first on-sale date, rather than a final cut-off for the programme. And it includes a sentence that working acts should read twice, because it governs what you will actually be paid. Each participating promoter works on a different business model, so terms differ room to room. That’s an honest thing to put in writing, and it also means your fee gets settled by whoever has the keys to the venue, which in practice means a conversation in a corridor about whether the door split counts the walk-ups. Anyone pricing this against the southern hemisphere’s registration rounds can compare with Adelaide Fringe’s 4 per cent ticket cut for 2027. Sydney’s 2027 application terms are another reference point.

Who touches the ticket money

The reason the Independent Comedy Festival exists at all is the payment failure that preceded it. Chortle reported in April that hundreds of comedians had been left unpaid by the Leicester Comedy Festival. Its September report said the sum owed to unsecured creditors was owed primarily to comedians and producers who brought shows there this year. The new festival, per Chortle’s August launch piece, is being put together by some of the comedians and promoters owed money by the previous organisers. It was founded by stand-up Alex Hylton with promoter Colin Bowles.

What they’ve changed is the plumbing. Chortle reported in August that the festival will be working with ticket platform TixEvery, which would pay comedians directly. At the launch, British Comedy Guide quoted TixEvery’s Harrison Salter on what that means in practice:

Funds generated from the face value of any ticket sales will not be accessible to the festival

That is a sentence written by somebody who has stood in a room with angry comedians. If it holds, the money never sits in a festival account waiting for a February that might not balance, which is exactly where it sat last time. Hylton’s line at the launch, as British Comedy Guide reported it, was that “Leicester deserves a brilliant comedy festival, artists deserve to be treated fairly”. Whether the second half of that is true will show up in bank statements in late February and nowhere earlier. Comics who want a sense of how thin the money gets further down a bill can read our piece on how festivals pay support acts, ideally before signing anything with a promoter they’ve never worked for.

Whether a knockout built for a hall still reads in a room where every seat is the front row is the one thing nobody can test in advance. Pun contests live on the audience groan, and a groan from 50 people lands differently to a groan from a packed De Montfort Hall. The window for those 12 spots opened on 14 October, so somebody is going to get in on a pun they wrote in a queue at Leicester station.