The first UK Women in Comedy Festival opens today with an extraordinary array of female talent taking part in shows across numerous venues. Hazel O’Keefe of Laughing Cows Comedy is spearheading the venture which takes place in the Greater Manchester area until Saturday 27th October.
The event, the result of a collaboration between Laughing Cows and other women comedy producers, including Funny Women, promises to be an: “opportunity for female comics across the UK to meet, perform, debate, discuss and get feedback from industry, insiders and professionals, all aiming to put an end to circular conversations and blow certain myths out of the water whilst to promoting the best of female comedy.”
The festival plays host to a wide variety of events such as workshops, debates, panels, readings and film, as well as good old fashioned stand up, courtesy of some of the funniest women in comedy today and with support from some fantastic Manchester venues, among them Contact Theatre, the Carlton Club and The Lowry.
Funny Women will be holding a special one hour 'taster' of its Stand Up to Stand Out Workshop on Thursday 24th October at The Lowry on Salford Quays, where we recently held a semi final of this year's Funny Women Awards. This workshop is a must for all those who want to take the plunge into performing or writing comedy. Whether you have a comic character to develop, a sketch idea brewing or a stand up routine that you would like to explore our workshop will offer you some insight into kickstarting a comedy career.
Later that same evening The Lowry will also be the venue for our Funny Women Awards Showcase – we saw over 200 hilarious new performance acts this year and now we can present the winners, runners up and other acts we feel show great promise, as well as some from past Awards! Read HERE to find out who will be in our show along with the main Award winners Twisted Loaf. If you buy a £10 ticket for the show, you get free entry to the taster workshop.
Funny Women founder Lynne Parker says: "Having visited the American Women in Comedy Festival in Boston earlier this year, I am delighted that we now have a festival on British soil! The opportunity to present female comedy across the broadest possible platform has always been one of our goals here at Funny Women so we’re 100% supportive.
"There have always been brilliantly funny women on the stage, in film and on television and it’s a strange that this is still not fully represented on the live comedy circuit which continues to be a bit of a boys’ locker room! We need a few more of them to forget their Snickers and change into Joan Collins!"
The festival also has great support from established comics like Jo Caulfield, one of the festival patrons, who says: “from Marie Lloyd to Sarah Millican, women have been making audiences laugh for centuries. Legends like Lucille Ball, Joan Rivers, Ellen DeGeneres, Jo Brand, French and Saunders and Miranda Hart paved the way for numerous female performers, many of whom are now carving out careers on the comedy circuit and beyond.”
Janey Godley, Lucy Porter, Shazia Mirza,and Zoe Lyons (who won the Funny Women Awards in 2004) are just some of the great names on the huge list of women who are performing at the festival. Funny Women Awards 2013 finalists Elf Lyons and Dotty Winters will be appearing in their own shows as well as 2012 finalist Viv Groskop signing copies of her book ‘I Laughed, I Cried…’
After our busy year of presenting the best of British female comedy in the US, at the Edinburgh Fringe and the Funny Women Awards last week, this new festival carries on the message that women have a lot of funny stuff to say and laugh about.
We'll be there on Thursday 24th October at The Lowry to show off the amazing new talent that this year's Funny Women Awards has produced and set the benchmark for the years to come! to book our workshop and showcase click HERE.
To find out more about the UK Women in Comedy Festival click HERE!
