2025 Award Nominees announced

Today, on the steps of the Melbourne Town Hall the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award nominees for Most Outstanding Show and Best Newcomer were announced.

A bumper list of nine nominees have been revealed for the 2025 Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award for Most Outstanding Show: Ahir Shah (UK) – Ends; Brett Blake – Little Turd; Flo & Joan starring George Fouracres (UK) – One Man Musical; Garry Starr – Classic Penguins; Greg Larsen – Geggy; Lou Wall – Breaking The Fifth Wall; Olga Koch (Russia/UK) – Comes From Money; Rahul Subramanian (India) – Who Are You? and Scout Boxall – God's Favourite.

Best Newcomer nominations for performers doing their first full Festival show – are: Anisa Nandaula – You Can't Say That; Ethan Cavanagh – Bond, Lost My Bond; Jessica Barton – Dirty Work; Kura Forrester (NZ) – Here if you Need; Meg Jäger – Renaissance Woman; Rapha Manajem – The Salmon Was Good; and Robyn Reynolds – What Doesn't Kill You.

The Golden Gibbo – in memory of the late, great Lynda Gibson – is aimed at finding a local, independent show that pursues the artists’ idea more than it pursues commercial gain. The 2025 nominees are: Kate Dolan – The Critic, Andy Balloch – The Wedding, Taylor Griffiths – Sublime Avenue, Conor Lynch – Chimp, Sugar Bits – Feminist Trash and Charlie Lewin – Frogaccini.

Winners will be announced on Saturday with additional awards bestowed including; Directors’ Choice, awarded by the Festival Director in consultation with festival programming colleagues to a show they think deserves to be celebrated; the People’s Choice Award for the most popular show of the Festival as determined by the ticket buying public; The Pinder Prize, honouring Festival co-founder John Pinder, and supporting a performer to travel to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe; and the Piece of Wood comics’ choice award, selected by past winners and presented to a peer literally for “doin’ good stuff ‘n’ that”.