Some of the UK’s leading female comedy names, including Miriam Margolyes OBE, Jo Brand, Kerry Godliman and Sally Phillips, are calling on Prime Minister Andy Burnham to put comedy in the Autumn Budget on 28th October.
They are among 735 signatories, alongside Sir Stephen Fry, Jason Manford and Bill Bailey MBE, to a letter organised by CRAFT, the Comedy Representation and Artform Trust, the national body for UK comedy. The campaign is backed by 25 cross-party parliamentarians, and Funny Women founder Lynne Parker sits on CRAFT’s Comedy Advisory Board.
Why it matters for women
Although it’s incredible to see so many women leading comedy at CRAFT, with fairness and diversity built into its founding culture, Parker says the lack of investment is a safety issue as well as a funding one. In CRAFT’s evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee’s Misogyny in Comedy inquiry, 73.5% of respondents said underinvestment makes people more vulnerable to misogyny, harassment and unsafe working conditions. Of those who answered the question, 52% reported experiencing sexual assault in their comedy work.
“I have spent more than twenty years building routes into comedy for women, and the first parliamentary inquiry into our industry confirmed what we have always known,” Parker says. “An industry with no public money has no infrastructure: no funded training routes, no safeguarding standards, no alternative to the gatekeepers who fail women and underrepresented talent; working-class, disabled and minority performers alike.
“Investment is not a luxury here; it is how you make comedy safe to enter and possible to stay in. Name and fund comedy in this Budget, and you open the door to the talent the industry is currently shutting out.”
Emerging comedian Ro Dodgson, also on CRAFT’s Advisory Board, says there is “no funded pathway” into comedy for her generation, and that the grassroots rooms that train new talent are closing one by one.
The case for change
CRAFT says comedy has no recognised artform status and no official industry or occupation code. It has never had a seat on the Creative Industries Council. Fewer than 30 dedicated comedy venues remain in the UK, and the sector received just 0.2% of the pandemic Culture Relief Fund. Less than £15 million of direct public investment has been attributed to comedy over 25 years.
Comedy made up 38.4% of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe programme, yet CRAFT says it saw no public reinvestment. Arts Council England attributed £0 of its £946.9 million spend to comedy in 2025/26. From 1st October it began tracking Live Comedy applications, a step CRAFT calls a start rather than a finish.
“The funny friend we forget to check on”
Lu Jackson, Chair of CRAFT and Founder CEO of Craic, (pictured above left with Funny Women founder Lynne Parker) says the sector has been overlooked for too long. “Comedy has lifted Britain through hard times for centuries, and we’ve treated it like the funny friend we forget to check on: we thought it was fine. It isn’t.”
Jackson argues that comedy is a serious business ecosystem. “Almost everyone in comedy is a founder; of an act, a script, a club, a festival, a series, a podcast, a channel, a game, a song, a cartoon, street art, or a company. They create something that didn’t exist before.” Yet, she says, “almost nothing has been reinvested into comedy despite it paying in. It’s invisible in policy structures that were never designed to include it.”
Her message to the Prime Minister is direct: “Britain can’t afford not to back comedy.” She points to mental ill health, which costs England around £300 billion a year, and says comedy “can help tackle the crises Government is already paying for: mental health, homelessness and NEET youth.”
Cross-party support
Dame Caroline Dinenage MP, a CRAFT patron and former Culture Minister, says the omission was never deliberate. “Nobody ever decided to exclude comedy. It simply fell through the gaps between the frameworks – and in Whitehall, what isn’t named doesn’t exist.”
“That is why support for comedy now runs across every party: this is not a political ask, it is an administrative correction with an economic return. The sector has done everything Government asked of it by organising, evidencing, and bringing a single national body to the table. The Autumn Budget is the moment to meet it halfway: name comedy, classify it, and let one of Britain’s best-loved industries compete on equal terms.”
Five asks
CRAFT is calling for:
- Tax reform
- Classification, so comedy can be counted
- Named recognition as an artform rather than a genre
- Funding across culture, education, creative health and innovation
- A sector meeting and impact assessment before the Budget
For Funny Women, which has spent more than twenty years building routes into comedy for women, the message is simple. Name comedy, classify it and fund it, and the industry can become safer and more open to those it has too often shut out.
For more information visit the CRAFT website here.
Read the letter and see the full list of signatories here.
Picture credit: Miriam Margolyes OBE by Steve Ullathorne.
