The prize list for this year’s Biggest Award in Comedy runs as follows: a 2m 4cm inflatable trophy, \u00a3500 in cash, and a hand pump. There is also, as Beyond The Joke’s write-up puts it, “A carry case (for transportation, not dignity)”. Voting opened on 7 August. Somewhere in Edinburgh this week, an act with three more weeks of flyering ahead of them is being nominated. The prize is a piece of gold plastic taller than most Fringe venue doorways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s run by NextUp, the comedy streaming service. The past winners listed on its own award page go back to Jordan Gray in 2022, then Lindsey Santoro in 2023, Colin Hoult in 2024 and Ayoade Bamgboye in 2025. The NextUp award is decided by the platform’s members rather than a judging panel, which makes it unlike almost every other trophy handed out in August. It is comfortably the only one that requires inflating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The winner is announced on 27 August 2026. Before that, NextUp reveals a longlist of 20 shows on 16 August, picked from member nominations combined with recommendations from its comedy scout network. Voting opened on 7 August, the Fringe’s first day. Any Fringe show can be nominated, not just the ones NextUp is streaming, and members get one vote each.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That eligibility line matters more than it sounds. There are 1,401 comedy shows on this year’s Fringe programme, as we counted when the programme dropped<\/a>. The vast majority of them will never be seen by anyone holding an award-panel lanyard. A nomination system that runs off punters changes the odds slightly. The two-hander in a 40-seat room with no PR is at least theoretically in the same pool as the Pleasance Beyond hour. That’s the one with a poster on every bus shelter on Lothian Road.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Chortle’s write-up of the 2026 NextUp award has the measurements. The trophy “stands 204cm tall, literally the biggest prize in the business and 1cm taller than last year.” Chortle said the same thing in 2025, when the trophy was 2.03 metres and also a centimetre taller than the year before. At that rate of inflation, which is the only pun available here and I’m taking it, the 2030 winner is carrying home 2.08 metres of vinyl.<\/p>\n\n\n\n NextUp co-founder Daniel Berg, quoted in that same Chortle piece, is at least honest about what he’s doing to the recipient:<\/p>\n\n\n\n While the Edinburgh Fringe simultaneously becomes more expensive and challenging for everyone involved, it’s a true honour to force an exhausted comedian to lug home a 2-metre inflatable award.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Daniel Berg, NextUp co-founder, speaking to Chortle<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Worth noting that the hand pump is listed as part of the prize, which tells you the thing arrives flat and the winner does the labour. Whether anyone has ever attempted to get one through the door of the Gilded Balloon’s Turret is not recorded anywhere I could find.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Not a week’s accommodation, for a start. The Edinburgh Comedy Awards, now backed by Audible, pay \u00a310,000 for the Audible Best Comedy Show, \u00a35,000 for the Taffner Family Best Newcomer and \u00a35,000 for the Audible Panel Prize. The new Banneret award<\/a> is \u00a31,500. The Fringe Society’s Keep It Fringe fund handed \u00a32,500 each to 16 shows out of the 402 that applied. Everyone else in Edinburgh this month is running on their own overdraft, plus whatever the day job wired over on the 28th.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Which is why I’d be reading further down the NextUp prize list, to “The opportunity to record and release their show as a NextUp comedy special.” A filmed hour with a distributor attached is the thing a working comic can actually convert into money later. It’s also the part of the package with no published number next to it. None of the three pages I read – Chortle’s, Beyond The Joke’s, or NextUp’s own award page – sets out what the recording pays. Nor do they say how long the rights are held for, or whether the comic can take the same tape elsewhere. That’s not an accusation of anything, but it’s a gap where a number would be useful, preferably filled in before the 27th rather than after.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For scale on what NextUp’s Fringe operation looks like from the paying side, the platform’s \u00a350 bundle covers 16 live-streamed Fringe shows<\/a> between 17 and 30 August. That works out at a bit over \u00a33 a show. A recorded special goes onto the same shelf as those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One vote per member, and members are people who’ve handed NextUp money for a comedy streaming subscription. That’s a self-selecting crowd of committed comedy nerds rather than a random sample of Fringe punters, and it cuts both ways. They’ll go and see things nobody has written about, and they’ll also skew towards acts already visible on the platform. The scout recommendations feeding the longlist are presumably there to stop the whole thing turning into a popularity contest among people with the biggest mailing lists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The 2025 winner is the argument for the award mattering. Ayoade Bamgboye took it, then won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for best newcomer, then joined the first cast of Saturday Night Live UK. Her line about the trophy, quoted by Chortle, is the sort of thing you only say about an award you actually liked: “It’s been one of the greatest honours of my life, I’ll never stop saying thank you to NextUp for inflating the biggest prize I’ve ever received outside the Pleasance bunkers … To the next winner, this is the stuff of dreams, savour it!” The Pleasance bunkers, for anyone who hasn’t done a run there, are exactly as glamorous as the name suggests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dates are worth laying side by side. The Edinburgh Comedy Awards reveal their shortlist on Wednesday 26 August and crown their winners on Saturday 29 August. NextUp names its winner on 27 August, in the 48-hour window between those two events. Every comedy journalist in the city is already writing about awards that week, and every shortlisted act is too nervous to eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s a decent slot for a small prize, and it means a comic shortlisted for \u00a310,000 on the Wednesday might be handed 204cm of inflatable vinyl by a rival ballot on the Thursday. The \u00a3500 isn’t changing anybody’s Fringe balance sheet, though the recording could, depending on terms nobody has published. Whoever wins is going to be the one crouched on a Cowgate pavement at 1am with a hand pump, working out whether the thing fits in the taxi.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe trophy grows a centimetre a year<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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What the \u00a3500 buys next to the rest of August’s prize money<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The electorate is a paying subscriber base<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
It lands two days before the big one<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Sources<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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