Theatre News

Awards Round-up: Best Joke, Malcolm Hardee & Herald Angels

Many awards have recently been announced in relation to the Edinburgh Fringe, as the 2011 festival nears its end. Those announced this week include the Bank of Scotland’s latest round of Herald Angel Awards, Digital TV channel Dave‘s Funniest Joke at the Fringe Award and the nominees for the Malcolm Hardee Awards.

Bank of Scotland’s Herald Angel Awards

Simon Callow has been announced as the winner of this week’s Bank of Scotland Herald Archangel Award. Fresh from his limited season of Being Shakespeare at the West End’s Trafalgar Studios, he is currently starring in solo show Tuesday at Tescos as Pauline, a transexual looking after her recently widowed father in the UK premiere of Emmanuel Darley’s Le Mardi a Monoprix.

Other winners of the Herald Angels Awards for this week are:

Turandot – Deaf and non-verbal performers and a choir create an opera for deaf people, inspired by the original, unfinished opera, Puccini’s letters and William Burrough‘s Naked Lunch.

Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage – An adaptation of the ancient poem staged as a high-energy song play.

Muscle– an all-male physical theatre ensemble

Louis Durra Trio – pianist’s adventurous piano/bass/drums trio delivers stimulating, entertaining and enjoyable deconstructions of jazz and pop songs, covering classic modern jazz to hip-hop and beyond.

These Silences – a mini-writing festival (affiliated to the Book Festival) at Summerhall, showcasing some of the most interesting experimental writers in the country.

Best Joke of the Edinburgh Fringe

TV channel Dave’s award for the funniest joke at this year’s Fringe Festival has also been announced. It was won by up-and-coming comedian Nick Helm with: “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

In response to winning the title, Helm replied, “I knew my joke was the funniest joke of all the other jokes in 2011.”

Other jokes featured in the top ten funniest jokes list were:

2) Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”

3) Hannibal Buress: “People say ‘I’m taking it one day at a time’. You know what? So is everybody. That’s how time works.”

4) Tim Key: “Drive-Thru McDonalds was more expensive than I thought… once you’ve hired the car…”

5) Matt Kirshen: “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, ‘Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”

6) Sarah Millican: “My mother told me, you don’t have to put anything in your mouth you don’t want to. Then she made me eat broccoli, which felt like double standards.”

7) Alan Sharp: “I was in a band which we called The Prevention, because we hoped people would say we were better than The Cure.”

8) Mark Watson: “Someone asked me recently – what would I rather give up, food or sex. Neither! I’m not falling for that one again, wife.”

9) Andrew Lawrence: “I admire these phone hackers. I think they have a lot of patience. I can’t even be bothered to check my OWN voicemails.”

10) DeAnne Smith: “My friend died doing what he loved … Heroin.”

Malcolm Hardee Awards Nominations

The 2011 judging panel consists of  Kate Copstick (The Scotsman), John Fleming (co-author of Malcolm’s autobiography), Dominic Maxwell (The Times) and Jay Richardson (The List / The Scotsman) for the Award ceremony held in memory of “one of the most anarchic figures of his era”

THE MALCOLM HARDEE AWARD FOR COMIC ORIGINALITY

Doctor Brown

James Hamilton

Bob Slayer

Johnny Sorrow

THE MALCOLM HARDEE CUNNING STUNT AWARD (for best Edinburgh Fringe publicity stunt)

Tim FitzHigham

Kunt and the Gang

Sanderson Jones

THE MALCOLM HARDEE ‘ACT MOST LIKELY TO MAKE A MILLION QUID’ AWARD

Benet Brandreth

Josh Widdicombe

The Awards will be presented on  Friday 26th August from 10pm at the Counting House, Edinburgh.