Leicester Comedy Festival 2021 Awards nominees
- Best Show: The Weirdos, Tim Key, Esther Manito, Stuart Laws, Fin Taylor
- Best Festival Appearance: Ahir Shah, Louise Young, Sikisa, Joe Thomas, Jamie D'Souza
- Best Kids Show: Jonny Awsum, Paul Currie, Philip Simon, Jeddy Bear & Gary's Picnic
The nominees have been announced for the Leicester Comedy Festival Awards 2021.
The awards, set up in 2006, aim to recognise the contribution people make to the annual February festival and include prizes for Best Show and Best Promoter.
This year's festival - which also incorporated The UK Kids' Comedy Festival 2021 - ran from 3rd to 21st February. Due to coronavirus restrictions, all shows - which added up to more than 1,600 hours of comedy - were streamed online. This proved to be hugely popular, with the organisers recently revealing over 20,000 tickets were sold.
The full list of nominees are:
Best Show
Weirdos Comedy: Gary & The Crisp Factory
Tim Key: He Used Thought As A Wife (The Recital)
Stuart Laws: Single Father Of None
Fin Taylor: Irrelevant Material For A Post-Vaccine World
Best Festival Appearance
Best Podcast
Biggest Idiot
The Dinner Party
Comedy Arcade
Jessica Fostekew: Hoovering
Best Kids Show
Jonny Awsum: The Gag Slinging Guitar Hero
Paul Currie: Turbo Fool
Philip Simon: School's Out Comedy Club
Jeddy Bear & Gary's Picnic
Liberty Award
Jericho Comedy
The Joke Spot/Leicester City Libraries
Beyond A Joke series
No More Jockeys Live/TripleCeePee
Weirdos/Gary & The Crisp Factory
Best Promoter
TripleCeePee
Just The Tonic
Tickled Pink
Leicester Cathedral
Tracey Miller Community Award
A Place To Grow (Blaby District BIG Weekend)
Headway Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland
North West Leicestershire District Schools
Tiernan Douieb
Focus Charity
Contribution to LCF21
NextUp Comedy
Rob Gee
MerchAid/Cool As Leicester
DCMS/Arts Council England
Business of the year
Octopus Energy
PPL PRS Ltd
Cool As Leicester
NextUp Comedy
The Rowleys Partnership
The winners will be announced at an invitation-only online awards ceremony taking place on Monday 29th March, hosted by Zoe Lyons.
A special Lifetime Contribution Award will also be presented on the night, to someone or an organisation who has made a significant contribution to the festival over a number of years. Festival producers will also present a Legend of Comedy Award to someone who has made an outstanding contribution to British comedy. Previous winners have included Barry Cryer, Ken Dodd, Victoria Wood and Johnny Vegas.
The nominees were decided upon by a panel of 26 members of the public who saw all eligible performances during the 19 day festival, and its kids offshoot.
Founding director Geoff Rowe says: "The 2021 festivals were clearly very different to previous festivals given everything was online. However, we still wanted to recognise the amazing contribution performers and others made to the events and we are still going ahead with our ceremony. We simply couldn't do the festivals without the involvement of so many people and the annual ceremony is our chance to recognise some of these people and organisations. Last year our awards ceremony was watched by over 4,000 people online and we expect more to join us this year. We hope everyone who was involved in the festivals this year will join us (and dress smartly!) to celebrate the continued success of Leicester Comedy Festival and The UK Kids' Comedy Festival."