Brighton Dome Comedy Festival 2026: Ten Days, Two Venues and a Very Long Stamptown

The Brighton Dome Comedy Festival ran October 16 to 25, and for the first time the Dome did it in partnership with Komedia, the club down the road. Two years ago the festival was four days. Last year it was ten. This year it was ten days in two buildings, which is how you can tell a festival is succeeding: it stops getting longer and starts getting wider, like a man after forty.

The Dome is a registered charity with Arts Council England and the city council on its list of funders, so in a sense the British taxpayer helped put Katherine Ryan in the Corn Exchange on the 23rd at £44 a seat, the dearest ticket on the program. I don't say that to complain. Most public money goes to roundabouts, and a roundabout has never once made me laugh, though I am told the St George's flags painted on some of them are coming along.

That joke belongs to Tom Davis, who opened the festival on the 16th in the Concert Hall with a tour called Spudgun, after his old building-site nickname. Nicola Benge of Brighton and Hove News reviewed it and laughed the whole way through: fatherhood, quitting drink, middle age, all hung on a stag do. Dinesh Nathan, from Crawley, opened for him and got recommended too. A big loud man talking softly about men's mental health is the kind of thing that used to get you thrown out of a building site and now sells out the Dome. That is progress, or else building sites have gotten worse.

After that the bill was the strongest London-adjacent lineup you could drive to without paying the congestion charge. Maisie Adam on the 21st. Simon Amstell on the 22nd. Nish Kumar on the 23rd, with a show titled Angry Humour from a Really Nice Guy, a title that is also how every man who has ever been in a traffic court describes himself. Sam Campbell did two nights of Kid Giblet. Jimeoin came through on the 18th, having apparently also played the Southport festival this month, so if you see a pleasant Australian walking along the English coast, leave him be, he's working. Blindboy recorded his podcast live. Jazz Emu, Catherine Bohart, Stevie Martin, Rosie Holt and Jordan Brookes were in there, and over at Komedia, Phil Ellis, Alfie Brown and a show called Solve-Along-a-Murder-She-Wrote, which is the only event on the program where the audience was guaranteed a killing.

The reviewed show everyone will talk about is Stamptown, the Zach Zucker variety night, which played the Corn Exchange on the 24th with Zucker as his alter ego Jack Tucker, plus Jordan Grey, Sam Campbell, Kemah Bob, Huge Davies and Lola Jean to close. Anna Piper at The Reviews Hub gave it 60 percent. She liked Grey and the finale and called the sound "needlessly, ear-deafeningly loud." She also noted it ran about two and a half hours against an advertised 90 minutes. Weddings run an hour over, but at a wedding somebody feeds you. Stamptown's fans gave it standing ovations anyway, and it heads to SF Sketchfest at the Castro on January 30, so America gets the long version next.

Beyond those two, I could only find previews and listings, so I won't tell you who killed and who died at the Dome. Nobody wrote it down, and I'd rather be dull than a liar, which is a trade most festival publicists will not make.

Now, should you submit? You can't, really. Brighton Dome books touring shows, and I found no open call, no fee and no application form on the festival site. The doors it does open are small and local: a Young Comedians showcase for £6 to close the festival, free workshops for 11-to-16-year-olds, and a Finding Your Funny workshop with Spymonkey that got postponed. If you're a working comic, the real way in is Komedia's own club nights, which ran festival editions on the Friday and Saturday and won Chortle's best pro night in the South this year. Get booked there, and the festival comes to you. No 2027 dates are posted yet.

Brighton built a bigger festival by asking the club down the road to come in on it, which is the oldest trick there is. A town that wants more comedy doesn't need more money so much as fewer people who think they're the only room in town.