Edward Aczel is a British stand-up comedian 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".[1] James Kettle in The Guardian called him "perhaps Britain's greatest living anti-comedian".[2]
Winner of the 2008 Malcolm Hardee Award,[3] he was the runner-up in the 2005 BBC New Comedy Awards[4] and in Jimmy Carr's Comedy Idol (which was filmed for the extras on Jimmy Carr's 2005 live DVD).
His 2010 Edinburgh show featured in the BBC Comedy Collection.[5]
In 2020, he appeared in an episode of the soap opera EastEnders.