Who doesn’t need a good laugh these days?
The Cleveland Comedy Awards celebrates the best of the best in local comedy with over an hour of stand-up performances and awards and prizes for the year’s biggest winners on March 11, at Hilarities 4th Street Theatre.
This year’s show is different from past Cleveland Comedy Awards shows, explained Brent Gambrel of Comedic CLE, the team putting on the event. Most notably, winners will receive prize money this year and not just a trophy. This is part of an effort to make the awards more impactful to the wider comedy community. That’s also why several of the awards this year are based on peer nominations.
“Instead of giving away trophies as we have in the past years for the peer-to-peer voting categories,” Gambrel said, “we give away prizes that are worth between $250 to $500 to the comedians to use towards advancing their careers in any way that they see fit.”
The 6th Annual Cleveland Comedy Awards
When: March 11 at 7:30 p.m. Doors open at 6:45 p.m.
Where: Hilarities 4th Street Theatre, 2035 E 4th St, Cleveland
Details: 21 and over. General admission: $12
The Road Warrior award is for comedians who travel and tour outside of Northeast Ohio. The Juggernaut Award goes to a comedian with a large presence in the stand-up community.
“The Juggernaut is kind of like an all-encompassing award,” explained Gambrel, “someone who – it can be anything from a comedian who does a large volume of shows to someone who’s in the industry that is very helpful to a large number of people – but as someone who is everywhere all the time, makes a big impact on the comedy community.”
The show is expected to run an hour and a half and will feature over an hour of performances, “and the rest will just be … chaos,” said Gambrel.
Last year’s Cleveland Comedy Awards Comedian of the Year, Elijah Nevels, a local influencer with more than 350,000 Instagram followers, will host this year’s festivities. Comedians John Bruton and Bill Squire will be handing out their own awards.
Dean Schnurr, of The Funny Bus, one of the show’s sponsors, said his team is looking forward to handing out a couple of the awards, too. “There is an absolute wealth of comedic talent in this area, and we are happy to be a part of that,” said Schnurr. “It’s important to sponsor events like the Comedy Awards so we can encourage young artists to follow their dreams and maybe become Cleveland’s next nationally headlining comedian.”
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