The Comedy for Change international community has awarded The Finger Awards for the first time, a prize created to honour outstanding comedic projects with social impact anywhere around the world.
The Finger Award for most creative comedy was given to Taboo, a Belgian TV show which first aired on broadcaster VRT in 2018 with a 54% share and has been given a greenlight for another series in 2021. In Taboo, comedian Philippe Geubels invites four guests with a range of disabilities or illnesses for a week's holiday in a lovely country house. After spending time getting to know his guests, he does an entire comedy-set on every topic with his new made friends on the front seats of a venue packed with people who are confronted with the same issue.
Taboo has been commissioned by public broadcaster TV3 in Spain following hot on the heels of its International Emmy® Award nomination for Best Non-scripted Entertainment and picked up by producer Kinetic for the US. The show has also been commissioned by Network 10 in Australia, Bell Media in Canada, SFR in Switzerland and rights have been picked up in over 15 territories through deals with distributor Line Up Industries.
The Finger Award for most effective comedy was given to The Tampon Book created by Germany based The Female Company. They created a campaign against unfair taxation of female sanitary products. The Female Company “tricked” the system by selling tampons hidden in a book thus avoiding the controversial “luxury items” tax on female hygiene products.
An honorary mention was awarded to German comic Jan Böhmermann for his project Do They Know It’s Europe where 20 political satirists from 16 European countries, united to create a new European anthem for the 2019 European Parliament election.
The first-ever Finger Awards ceremony was hosted by Cally Beaton, a former senior TV executive, turned comedian, writer, and broadcaster at a special event held at C21 Content London this evening.
The Finger Award was created to provide a platform for comedy professionals who have gone out of their way to try to make the world a better place using their craft. It represents an industry recognition of these efforts by an international panel of over 50 A-list judges, all members of the Comedy for Change community. Among them are writers from The Simpsons, Family Guy, HIGNFY and more.
Nominations for the first Finger Awards included 80 candidates from over 30 countries and encompassed stand-up routines, trolling acts, TV shows, ad campaigns, podcasts and more.
The Finger Awards was produced by Noa Margalit with the support of the Schusterman Foundation. The initiative is led by a steering committee of high profile names from all aspects of the international industry including writer and multi Emmy Award winner Rob Kutner from the US (Conan, The Daily Show), Alessandra Orofino from Brazil (The Gregg Show), comedian Dan Ilic from Australia and Keri Lewis Brown from the UK (K7Media).
Omri Marcus, director of the Finger Awards said: “It was George Orwell that once said that every joke is a tiny revolution. We have ambitions for these awards to make it clear that the unique power of comedy to shake perceptions, raise awareness, ridicule social injustice and sometimes even literally change legislation is in our hands. Our international community is all about joining forces to educate and collaborate so the joke won’t be on us.”
