Ed Aczel

Edward Aczel, also billed as Ed Aczel^[1][2] is a British stand-up comedian and actor. He known for his "anti-comedy" style of clumsy delivery presenting as uninterested and lacking belief in both his material and performing skills.

His 2008 Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, "Do I Really Have to Communicate with You?", was described by Zadie Smith in The New Yorker as "one of the strangest, and finest, hours of live comedy I’d ever seen".^[3] James Kettle in The Guardian called him "perhaps Britain's greatest living anti-comedian".^[4]

Winner of the 2008 Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality,^[5] he was the runner-up in both the 2005 BBC New Comedy Awards^[6] and Jimmy Carr's Comedy Idol in 2004, which was filmed for the extras on Jimmy's 2005 Live DVD).^[7]

His 2010 Edinburgh show featured in the BBC Comedy Collection.^[8]

As an actor, he has appeared in two episodes of the soap opera EastEnders^[9], 2018 film The Favourite, series 2 of Mandy, Lee and Dean and Doctors.