World Laughter Day: Discover the playful and impactful sides to National Lottery funding

Comedy is ‘a broad church’

The National Lottery’s data archive is littered with laughter. Fast approaching a thousand grants have supported ‘funny stuff’. And as comedy is a broad church so the data shows various aspects:

• Individuals, stand-up comedians.
• The ancient art of clowning.
• Festivals like The Edinburgh Fringe, or Belfast International Comedy Festival, or Black Mountains Comedy Festival, Powys, Wales among others.
• Classic comedies by The Royal Shakespeare Company.
• Multiple mental health projects that use and celebrate comedy.
• Laughter therapy for various people in different stages of recovery.
• Comedy shows at local theatres, and funny school plays around the UK.
• Comedy venues like The Globe in Stockton-on-Tees, in the North East region of England, that received over £5m in 2013.

Who doesn’t like a laugh?

The funding has been inclusive. Humorous African storytelling and Asian comedy heritage projects sit alongside the acquired taste of stand-up James Acaster (of TV appearance fame), as well as a few mainstream rom-com movies.

One individual used a small grant for a project in 2014 called ‘Am I Funny?’ to address the question, ‘Can deaf people do stand up?’. Elsewhere, you don’t need to be a fluent Welsh speaker to appreciate ‘Cerdi Ha Ha’: a project that won a small grant in 2019 to develop a Welsh-language comedy show for the National Eisteddfod, Wales.

Laughter is the best medicine

The data shows many hundreds of meaningful projects that make use of comedy.

Birmingham-based WE:ARE (Women's Empowerment and Recovery Educators) received over £360k in 2017 to support women and children affected by domestic abuse. Over time, sessions were steadily and sensitively co-delivered by organisations including the NSPCC, and included innovations like ‘laughter yoga’.

Theodora Children’s Charity has used grants to train new ‘giggle doctors’ to visit children at different hospitals. They bring families together, reduce stress, and support wellbeing through the power of laughter.

Laughter is a lifeline

BrightSparks Arts in Mental Health CIC run their ‘Comedy Asylum’ programme in Leicester and surrounding locations. The organisation has supported people living with severe and enduring mental illness to create and perform comedy since 2008.

Led by award-winning stand up, poet and former mental health nurse Rob Gee, The Comedy Asylum is a group of artists - some of whom also receive mental health treatment. They deliver workshops in improvisation, sketch writing, word games and performance.

The Comedy Asylum is a safe and welcoming social space for some of the most vulnerable people in the community. Participants tell the organisation that the programme is "a real lifeline" – one person told them that their workshops are the only time in the week when she speaks to another person.

Funded by the National Lottery since 2016, Comedy Asylum now delivers weekly workshops. Plus, the organisation works in partnership with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, managing referrals from mental health teams – supporting participants through their mental health journeys in hospital, in Recovery Colleges and in community settings.

Always leave ‘em laughing

Even an 'outraged' commentator or keyboard warrior might appreciate this legacy of laughter and its powers, from 30 years of, uh, fun-ding (apologies for that pun).

If you can't yet see or feel the positive impacts, here's an encore to help you see the funny side...

Try your hand at this comedic quiz, by guessing which of these 12 projects have been funded by the National Lottery. Click to turn over each card to find out some more info about a few of the real projects that have helped put the fun into funding.

As the (tired) joke goes, 'May the fourth be with you...'