So John Kearns won the Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award today. The first ever Best Newcomer to win the main prize in the following year and, perhaps more significantly, the first Free Fringe performer to win the Edinburgh Comedy Award. The Free Fringe has been having more of an impact every year since Imran Yusuf first picked up a Best Newcomer nomination, but that’s another story. I want to celebrate and discuss Kearns’ victory here.
The Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award winner is announced at lunchtime today in a ceremony starting at 12.30pm, so I guess I’d better have a crack at picking a winner. I suggested five nominees earlier in the week and got four of them right. Picking an outright winner is a tougher call altogether, but here goes.
It must be quite intimating for So You Think You’re Funny finalists to look at the roll call of previous winners. Can they join the likes of Peter Kay, Tommy Tiernan, Lee Mack and Dylan Moran? Not that you could see any sign of nerves on the face of first entrant Elliot Steel who strutted on after compere Zoe Lyons' lively warm-up and delivered a bullet-proof 8 minutes about being a 17-year-old sarf Londoner and doing everything adults do, but illegally.
The comedy world is still waiting for white smoke to emerge from the panel meeting and the official Foster's Award shortlist to announced any time now. So while we wait these were my predictions after the first week. There will probably be five or six nominees when the official list is out, but I haven't seen anyone since the first week who would knock this quintet off the list. Then again, there is always likely to be a curveball so this could be completely wrong...
Sara Pascoe
James Acaster
The nominations for the 2014 Foster’s Comedy Awards have been announced. They are as follows:
Sara Pascoe
James Acaster
John Kearns
Liam Williams
Alex Horne
Romesh Ranganathan
Sam Simmons
TV channel Dave has announced the winner of the seventh annual award for Dave’s Funniest Joke of the Fringe.
The shortlist for the annual Increasingly Prestigious* Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards has been announced as follows:
The three nominees for the main
MALCOLM HARDEE AWARD FOR COMIC ORIGINALITY
(which is awarded to performers not to shows)
are:
The Birdmann
in A Man Like No Man
4.00pm at Bob & Miss Behave’s Bookshop
Comedian and actor Lenny Henry is working on a play with the National Theatre about the life of legendary stand-up comedian Richard Pryor. Talking to Robert Elms on BBC London today Henry revealed that this is one of the various projects he is currently working on.
It was not confirmed if Henry would play Pryor, but given his stand-up background and his recent acclaimed acting career it seems to be the perfect fit. Henry has previously appeared at the National in The Comedy of Errors.
It’s the final week of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and as well as ongoing shows which are doing well there are some particularly good one-off late-night shows where comedians loosen up a little and have a good time. There are over 600 comedy shows on the Fringe so I'll never see them all, but these are some highlights that I’m determined to catch. If you can’t bag tickets for these stick a pin in the brochure and take a punt. You never know what you might find.
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