Joe Kent-Walters has been given the DLT Entertainment Best Newcomer Award in the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards, and deservedly so, for Joe Kent-Walters is Frankie Monroe: LIVE!!!! The show is a blast.
It's set in a working men's club in Rotherham which has seen better days, as has its MC, Frankie Monroe. (This device is much helped by the show being performed late at night in an overheated, low-ceilinged basement room at Monkey Barrel.)
Amy Gledhill won the Don and Eleanor Taffner Best Comedy Show, the main award at the 2024 Edinburgh Comedy Awards for Make Me Look Fit on the Poster. The show has variously been described as “bawdy comedy delivered with a blush”, “a funny woman rightly confident of her comedy talents” and “a brilliant physical comedian”.
Accepting her award, Gledhill said: “This is insane. I saw the other people on this list and I thought, 'I don't have to write a script!'”
Grace Mulvey, Assembly Roxy ★★★
Grace Mulvey has been single for five years, she tells us at the top of the show, a matter of some disappointment to her mother back in Dublin. Even moving to London two years ago didn't change her dating status, despite the best efforts of her flatmates. But then, they're lesbians and she's straight, so maybe their advice isn't quite hitting the spot.
Stevie Martin, Monkey Barrel ★★★
Stevie Martin is part of the generation of comics for whom the internet is a natural home; she has racked up tens of millions of views for her work online, where she had to strut her stuff when the world went into lockdown.
Chris Grace, Assembly George Square ★★★★
Emma Sidi Is Sue Gray Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★
I have no idea what Sue Gray - the former senior civil servant who is now The Prime Minister’s right-hand woman - sounds like, but I’m guessing not someone who has stepped straight out of The Only Way Is Essex.
Eric Rushton, Monkey Barrel @ The Hive ★★★★
Anna Akana, Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★
Jin Hao Li Pleasance Courtyard ★★★★
Jin Hao Li was born in China, raised in Singapore and studied English at a Scottish university. So it’s perhaps not surprising that, in drawing on so many cultural sources, his brand of comedy should be so singular.
