UK Live Comedy Sector Survey

This survey has closed. A full report will be published later this year. The preliminary findings are that the live comedy sector is annually worth over £1billion to the UK economy

Thanks for looking at this survey which aims to make a first stab at tracking the size and scale of the UK live comedy sector. We don't think anything like this has happened before and we will publish the results and share the findings with stakeholders and policy makers. With a general election happening on 4th July 2024, we think it's important to shout again about what we all do and the impacts we have.

We would like people who consider UK live comedy to be their main/primary sector of work to complete this survey. It's OK if you do other things as well, but welcome aboard if live comedy is your main thing.

This survey is a partnership between the Live Comedy Association, the Centre for Comedy Studies Research (Brunel University London) and British Comedy Guide. The research team at Brunel University London will independently compile and analyse the data*. We will produce an initial report with some survey "headlines", and then a further report which we plan to discuss and share at an event as part of Leicester Comedy Festival 2025.

Other sectors are miles ahead of the UK live comedy sector in terms of assessing their size and scale (for an example see the UK Live Music Census of 2017). In 2020, during the pandemic, the Live Comedy Association (LCA) conducted a survey of members about the possible impact of Covid but it didn't contain details about the broad economic, social and cultural benefits of what we do. Without this data, we don't think the sector can shout loudly enough, and perhaps more importantly, we don't think the right people will listen and value the impact live comedy has.

Taking the survey

The survey is open until 23:59 BST on Sunday 7th July 2024.

For those of you who work in an organisation, please discuss amongst yourselves to decide who will complete the survey on behalf of the organisation.

If you are a festival that also has a venue, or you wear more than one comedy hat, you can complete this survey as many times as needed, or just fill it out once if you think that's better.

The survey is anonymous. It only takes 5 minutes to complete, so grab a cuppa and make a start.

The survey has now closed. Thank you to everyone who took part.

To find out more about this study, read the participant information sheet (PDF).

Please get in touch with us if you have any questions about the survey by emailing: Comedy.Studies@brunel.ac.uk

* Research ethics approval has been obtained from the College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences (CBASS) Research Ethics Committee at Brunel University London to complete this survey.