WIN A PAIR OF TICKETS to see Edward Aczel at The Belmont Hotel

Righty, following on from my Offbeat Stand-ups preview post, here's another awesome ticket competition for you lucky folks. Courtesy of Bottle Rocket Comedy Club, Leicester Comedy Scene has two tickets to give away to see the magnificent Edward Aczel performing his show 'Edward Aczel has no clear plan emerging' at the Belmont Hotel on Sat 23rd Feb, as part of Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival.

Edward Aczel is known as a hero of 'anti-comedy'. His style is shambolic, poorly presented and he has no confidence in his own skill as a stand-up. For anyone else, this combination would add up to a terrible, unwatchable show, but somehow in the hands of Aczel, it works. His complete lack of witty material and slapdash approach to delivery make for a unique and very funny show. And to prove it, he won the coveted Malcolm Hardee Award at Edinburgh in 2008 and was a runner-up in the 2005 BBC New Comedy Awards, alongside the then-unknown Sarah Millican.

FESTIVAL PREVIEW #1 - offbeat stand-ups

Right then, here we go... the festival brochure has been doing the rounds for quite a while now, and as the annual jamboree of mirth approaches, I am getting more and more people asking me which shows I would recommend going to see. Well, given that everyone's tastes are different when it comes to what makes them laugh, the simple answer to that is "depends what you're into, really".

Of course, if I just left it at that, it would constitute a massive cop-out on my part. So here for your delectation and rumination, I present the first of my festival preview posts, in which I take the intimidatingly vast hog-roast that is Dave's Leicester Comedy Festival and chop it up into easily-digestible bacon-bites for you (facon bites for veggies, obviously) I'll be looking at a different category of comedy in each post - today I present some of my favourite offbeat stand-ups.