by Isabelle Adam of Comedy Club 4 Kids

Last Saturday,  it was announced that Comedy Club 4 Kids had won the Victoria Wood prize at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards. (Glorious! Ridiculous! Something something the Rule Of Three!) Co-director Tiernan Douieb and I then made a short speech, of thanks and jubilation, but it turns out I have lot more to say.  Hence…THIS.

A little over 20 years ago, comedian James Campbell resolved to open a comedy club for ages 6+, wanting the fizzy joy of stand-up – both watching it and performing it – to be something that wasn’t closed off to kids. 

To be given The Victoria Wood Award recognises the value in our having spent two decades doing exactly this, and it will enable us to do more; reach more people; entertain and empower still more children. And it’s properly thrilling that the award has Victoria Wood’s name on it, it’s like getting her seal of approval for our endeavours, a woman who truly knew the value of comedy and wanted every word, gesture and glance to be exactly right.

I am really really proud of us. And giddily grateful to everyone who has helped us along the way over the last 20 years.

We bring comedy to children and their families, both as something to consume and something they themselves can do. Right from the start, we've been running comedy classes for kids, teaching them how to put a set together and perform it with confidence; giving them the chance to be funny, not just giggle at grown-ups onstage. We want comedy to be accessible, in all sorts of ways.

And we want to do right by everybody.

If you saw Max & Ivan’s The Wrestling, you’ll know Andrew Maxwell started a chant of ‘fair play! decency!’ which really took off. 

That’s very much the ethos of Comedy Club 4 Kids (as well as ACMS, aka the Alternative Comedy Memorial Society late-night mixed-bill I also produce). We look after our acts, audiences and venue staff; we don’t book creeps or bigots or those who would be glib with other peoples’ feelings. Or their phone numbers, come to that. 

The performers are pitching their material at kids first, with jokes in the mix for adults too, but nothing at the expense of a child. It’s celebrational rather than punching down. And it WORKS.

We do at least 100 shows a year all over the UK, in theatres, schools and at festivals. We run fortnightly workshops on Zoom and in-person ones in Central London too, popping up with other such sessions wherever booked, and have also written a comedy course for the Pauline Quirke Academy, enabling us to reach still more children. 

We have a podcast called Radio Nonsense where comics answer kids’ bananas questions with still more outright silliness. We sell a how-to book on writing and performing comedy, a £5 tome whose final two pages are taken up with exhortations to be pleasant, polite and punctual because it will always get you more work. Mindful that budgets are tightening everywhere, we offer free worksheet resources which people can use to run a workshop themselves, without needing to pay us to provide it. 

 In the last few months we have set up a community interest company, so we can apply for grant money to bring the workshops to kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, which is another excellent step forward. And winning the Fringe’s panel prize gives us a rocket-booster to do more.

Very glad to have been given this award. Obviously.

Very glad to have found out about it the day before, too: I don't know how Ayoade Bamgboye and Sam Nicoresti (above with Tiernan) kept it together as they did, finding out they had won their categories at the ceremony itself.

Very glad to feel like we’re sharing the award with everyone we’ve worked with as well. Many of whom were right there at the ceremony with us. Physically, and metaphorically too.

We have spent 20 years putting excellent line-ups in front of children and their assorted adults. Performers who know the joy – and danger – in gigging for a 6+ crowd, cos if they like you they will make it immediately plain but if they don’t, well, the heckles can be BRUTAL. (How do you recover from ‘I hate your eyes’, from a little girl looking directly into them!?)

 Acts with a TV profile and those who aren’t yet household names have all graced our stages; Mitch Benn, Stuart Goldsmith, and Patrick Monahan are among the longest-serving comics on our roster, but we’re adding new names all the time. So far 19 of the UK Taskmaster contestants have gigged for us, as have The Horne Section.

In the last 20 years, 25 of the Comedy Award's main prize winners and nominees have done our shows; Elf Lyons is our only dancing parrot, thus far at least. Just as Katie Pritchard has been our only singing gorilla, Colt Cabana our only professional wrestler and Mark Watson our only inadvertent shoe thief (NB he did give them back). Though again, there’s still time. Even while Tiernan and I were speaking at the ceremony, we were sharing the stage with CC4K veteran John Kearns, whose inflatable horse costume slowly deflating around him lives forever in my memory. Nice to see him looking so dapper on Saturday, rather than the world’s most forlorn cowboy.

Nicer still to know we have put a double Edinburgh Comedy Award winner in front of families, and that he isn’t the only one to try something so daft.

We book an energising mix of stand-ups, character comedians, sketch acts, musical comics, cabaret performers, improvisers and even circus tricksters. Our last show of this year's Fringe saw Alexander Bennett riffing with the audience - hoo boy do kids have compelling ideas on how to deal with a sudden bear in Nan's garden – followed by Sam See quizzing children on what he'd just told them of himself and Chinese culture for the chance to win some of his own money, and then Bec Hill leading us in a moose sing-along, chatting about super-powers and showing off her latest flipchart creation. Our bills are not just young men in T-shirts and jeans, noticing stuff. That's not a nourishing diet at ALL.

Bec Hill and Alexander Bennett with the award

Our performers don't just differ in terms of style, but their very being too. There's a proper range of nationalities and accents, ethnicities, ages, physicality, financial backgrounds, gender presentations, sexual orientations and even heights and hairstyles in our line-ups, most of which goes unmentioned, but it hums away underneath proceedings all the same.

It's important to us that those in the audience can see themselves represented onstage, be it in someone who looks like them, or sounds like them, or who thinks like them. And it's also important that the audience engage with acts wholly unlike themselves, and find that funny is funny, even if the comic is e.g. tattooed or talking about focaccia (we've had some very odd complaints).

Andrew O'Neill might well be the first non-binary person our audience have met; almost certainly they are the only one to talk with such relish about wetting themselves in karate as a kid, gleefully teaching our audiences that embarrassment fades and what you're left with is a funny anecdote you can be paid to retell in arts centres and the like. About, in their case, inadvertently acting as a sprinkler while doing high-kicks.

We cheerily tell people there’s very little educational content to our shows, but that’s mainly because we don’t teach anyone little songs about the alphabet or telling the time. There are still valuable lessons to be learned. Including the fact that a show can have ‘4 Kids’ in its title and not be babyish.

A much treasured compliment is when an audient thanks us for putting on shows that have entertained everyone in their group: little kids, hard-to-please teenagers, parents and guardians, and older relations too. Comedy is for everybody. And children learn to be a good audience member in our shows, aping what others are doing – ideally sitting still, facing forwards, phone off, and really listening – as they realise comedy can be more than just joke-book jokes.

We love that acts find they relish gigging for ages 6+, just as much as our audience appreciate non-patronising family-friendly fare. It is fantastic that some of our gig veterans have gone on to stage their own solo shows for all-age audiences; Trygve Wakenshaw's physical comedy Monsterrrr! was a glorious way to start your Edfringe day this summer, Marcel Lucont's game show for awful children is still touring, and sketch duo Shelf are currently brewing up both their second kids show and a kids book too.

It's a point of pride that we're growing a comedy audience for the future. People watch us when they're young, with their friends and family all around them, and comedy gets its hooks dug in deep. An audient at the last ACMS of the Fringe told me that she'd seen CC4K shows as a kid, and was now at the festival feasting on comedy as an adult. The pipeline works!

Am also delighted some of our workshoppers have stayed in the arts as they’ve gotten older. As I’m typing I’m still set to burst with fierce pride for Finlay Christie, with his new special just out online; for Eros Vlahos, currently directing Mawaan Rizwan’s second series of Juice for the BBC; and for Preston Nyman, last heard as the young ​Zazu in Mufasa: The Lion King. And the ones who haven’t stayed in the spotlight are armoured for the rest of their lives with skills in communication and connection, able to charm a room AND to pull a mic out of the stand without punching themselves in the face. 

Not every child goes to a school with a debating society and public speaking can be hugely daunting. Comedy workshops means participants grow up able to articulate themselves and advocate for themselves, knowing how to appear confident and in control until that apparent self-assurance convinces their listeners they are to be trusted, and the sense of peace is genuine. They also know just the right moment to deploy a killer line, pop the tension bubble, and get the room HOOTING.

Everyone can do this. They just don’t always want to stick with it And fair enough. Comedy as a career can be precarious.

Which is why it’s also important we pay our performers a decent fee, generally calculated as a percentage of the guarantee we're getting on the gig. Distant shows pay more. And we've been known to pay out bonuses, where a show has sold particularly well, because that seems only right.

It’s not just ‘fair play! decency!’ It's fair pay too. Paid out promptly.

Our finance whizz Mel, our third co-director, apologises to acts if their payment takes her more than a couple of days after receipt of their invoice, even if we are still months away from being paid for the show ourselves. The idea of comics needing to chase US for their earnings is ludicrous.

It's a point of justifiable pride with her, and the company in general. There’s a lot of talk in various industries about supporting the mental health of your workforce, and one wildly effective method is to pay people the money they are owed in a timely manner.

It's easy to be kind.

As I said to Edinburgh Comedy Awards producer Nica Burns on Friday last, while she was studying the flyer we gave our audience advertising our own upcoming gigs on one side, and on the other recommended 17 funny, family-friendly Fringe shows that aren't us, that network of connectivity and support can really help boost well-being, as well as audience numbers. (ACMS does the same thing on a grander scale, putting together a full colour booklet of 300+ time-ordered show recommendations which again, no one pays us to feature within.) We strive to look after everybody. And we are taking the award as recognition of that fact too.

I joined Comedy Club 4 Kids as a tech, flyerer and posterer, all the way back in 2005, then was drafted in to help with the workshops (on the basis of ‘may as well, you’re already here’) and the smooth running of the shows.

 Two decades later I now wear a producer hat for the company, and have become our designer, programmer and workshop queen. As well as, for the Fringe at least, a posterer still. What was once my weekend job has become my main source of income as I, gloriously, get paid to put funny people on at shows I then get to enjoy, and teach children how to be funny in classes I also get to hoot along at. And all of this is the reason my flat now contains a really rather magnificent trophy. Amazing. AMAZING.

Massive thank-yous to the judging panel, Mark Makin Productions, and everyone we’ve worked with over the last two decades. The Victoria Wood Award is yours as well. You can hold it, if you like. But you’d ruddy well better give it back. It’s rare validation is presented in such a physical form, and I am KEEPING IT.

Published: 30 Aug 2025