Nottingham Comedy Festival 2026: 130 Shows, a Slug War and a Joke About Math

The Nottingham Comedy Festival ran its 18th edition from Friday, October 30 to Sunday, November 8, ten days of comedy spread across fourteen venues and more than 130 shows. Helen Stead has run it since the beginning, and Castle Rock Brewery has backed it since 2009, which is the correct order of operations for any British arts event. First you find a woman who will do all the work, then you find a brewery. The audience takes care of itself after the second pint.

It opened, I'm happy to report, with slugs. Benny Shakes, from Selston, kicked things off at the Cock and Hoop with a children's show called Slugageddon, in which he fights a slug army with a piano made of vegetables and faces a final showdown with the King Slug. I've seen a lot of festival openers. Most of them are a man in a blazer thanking the sponsors. I would trade every one of them for a vegetable piano, and I suspect the sponsors would too, if anyone had ever asked them.

The preview press led with the big names: Kevin Bridges, Seann Walsh, Chloe Petts, Rachel Fairburn, Paddy Young and Arthur Smith. Bridges played the Motorpoint Arena on November 1, which is a little like listing the Atlantic Ocean as a guest at your pool party. Technically it's nearby. The real festival was smaller and stranger, in places like the Cosy Club, Fisher Gate Point, the Canalhouse and the Barley Twist, at prices from pay-what-you-want up to £17.50 for Matt Winning's show, Solastalgia. The final Sunday alone had Tony Law, Yuriko Kotani, poetry, a political brunch and a man named Chris ONeil whose show title promised 55 minutes of adequately amusing jokes from an Irishman recently turned 67. That is the most honest piece of marketing I've seen this year, and I've read cereal boxes.

The Arts Council paid for four Spotlight Showcases at the SaltBox, one each for LGBTQIA+ acts, disabled and neurodiverse acts, women, and Nottinghamshire locals, every bill mixing pros with newer comics. Say what you like about public arts money, and people do, usually at the top of their voices, but it bought four rooms full of comics who don't normally get a booker's phone number. That's a better return than most government spending, which generally buys a consultant's report about the weather.

Not everything made it to the stage. Caitriona Dowden's Sunday show was cancelled because her train was, and the festival filled her slot with a pay-what-you-want screening of the 2002 Scooby-Doo movie. Gareth Mutch's show was cancelled, Russ Lee's closing All Stars night was cancelled, and Tom Wrigglesworth's A History of Hand Driers got moved to February 7. A comedian's career is a long fight against obscurity, poverty and self-doubt, and then one Sunday it turns out the real enemy was the train timetable.

The big prize was the Joke of the Festival award, run by Takeover Radio 106.9, a youth community station in Ashfield, and voted on by its listeners. Angela Bra won it with a pun from her show Secret Diary of a Bingo Call Girl 2, about a pupil who cheats on his homework by turning a minus sign into a plus. She's let it slide before, she says, but this time he's really crossed a line. Last year Alex Mitchell won with a joke about a driving test that ended in Cambridge. Nottingham, it seems, likes its comedy the way it likes its tax returns: tidy, numerical and quietly devastating.

Now the part comics care about. Nottingham is open to acts of every level and style. The 2026 deadline was June 26, and the festival invoiced £45 per show, plus a £30 admin fee for each extra performance of the same show. You promote your own show, there are no refunds if you cancel, and the terms ask you, politely, not to cancel over slow ticket sales. The festival publishes no performer pay terms, so budget as if what you take home is the exposure and the hangover. Applications are closed and no 2027 date has been posted. Bra's prize includes free registration next year, which means the most valuable joke in Nottingham was worth, at minimum, one £45 invoice.

Heckle's verdict: if you're a working comic within driving distance with an hour to try out, £45 for ten days of listings, a real audience and a fighting chance at a radio award is about as fair as this business gets. Just take the car. A festival is a fine place to find out whether your jokes work, but it's no place to find out whether the trains do. You already know the answer to that one.