Edinburgh Festival Comedy - Manchester Style

Two of Manchester's favourite comedians will be heading north this August, adding their fine comic talents to the lucky Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Peter Slater and Seymour Mace - of BBC3's hit comedy series Ideal - will be treading the boards at The Pleasance Courtyard from 5th - 30th of August 2009 with their brand new show Sundayland - a show offering silliness at its very stupidest, in the capable hands of two massive idiots with a wealth of experience at being daft!

As a bonus for those of us not planning to venture that far from sunny Manchester this summer, there will be a preview performance of the show on Tuesday 28th July 8pm at Bar XS (Remedy Bar) in Fallowfield, Manchester.

Comedy in Manchester will never be the same

The Unbroadcastable Radio Show at The Comedy Store Manchester will sadly come to a close with it's final performance this Sunday. The hugely popular cult hit has been providing some of the finest comedy in Manchester since 2003 and the show is still ONLY £5!! However, due to various circumstances, Sunday 21st June will see this marvellous cast assembled at the Manchester comedy venue for the final time. The show promises to be an epic, so get down to The Comedy Store this Sunday as you won't get another chance to see this live comedy gold.

Pssst... Brilliant Comedy Secret!

I'm not mad about going to see plays, I prefer to stick to pure Manchester comedy, but when I heard about this treat and some of the fantastic people involved, it sounded right up my street so I went along - and it was a million miles from disappointment.

JB Shorts is a series of six plays performed in one evening, with none of them lasting beyond 15 minutes. It's a genious idea, especially if you share my short attention span.

Some of the stand-out performances of the evening came from familiar TV faces; Peter Slater, John Henshaw and James Quinn.

The plays run until 4th April at Joshua Brooks, on Princess Street, and it's the best fiver you can spend on a night out. For more information, click here.

Live Comedy Sketch Show vs Stand-Up Comedy

The beauty of a live comedy sketch show, as opposed to the more rife genre of stand-up, is the sheer amount of diversity that can be packed into a well-honed example of the medium.

If you spend your hard-earned tokens on going to see a stand up comedian, and they're basically a bit crap, then you're stuck with that style of crapness for the whole of their act. Wheras, if you go along to a live sketch show performance and you don't particularly like a sketch, you know there'll be another one along in a minute so it doesn't really matter!

That's why I'd say it's always better to opt for a sketch show where possible, when you're weighing up the Manchester comedy listings.

Manchester Comedy

The best live Manchester comedy show will be giving it's greatest ever comedy performance sometime over the next few months, when The Unbroadcastable Radio Show at The Comedy Store in Manchester is performed for the very last time.

That it will be their last live comedy show is a sad fact indeed, after six successful years of cheering up Manchester on those grey Sunday evenings, but the event itself should prove to be anything but.

The line up will include the usual suspects - Toby Hadoke, Helen Copley, Peter Slater and Dominic Woodward. However, there are rumours of some much-loved former members making a reappearance for this one-off special show.

As far as cheap comedy tickets go, this is about as good as it gets - it's a bumper show with three packed sections (so plenty of drinking time) and still only a fiver to see the whole performance!

If you haven't been before, it really is worth the trip - it's a far cry from the overpriced, stag-do-packed stand up comedy nights that The Comedy Store is all too well known for, and for people who actually have a brain, it's invariably funnier too!