The Kilkenny Cat Laughs Festival is taking to the road and going on tour for the first time in its 30 year history.
Organisers are bringing the much loved format of a headliner act appearing along with a lesser known comedian on stage in Belfast, Derry and Mayo before returning to Kilkenny for the three day festival on the June Bank Holiday weekend.
Speaking on the Saturday Show with Edward Hayden, founder Richard Cook says this won’t take away from this year’s Cat Laughs Festival.
“The great thing that we’ve started to do, I said to Angela Squire, who’s been programming it for the last three or four years, ‘you know what, I don’t want Kilkenny to become a poor version of the Iveagh Gardens or Galway’, what would be good would be to really spice it up with a lot of new acts, so what you’re seeing in Kilkenny every year is between 10 and 15 new acts, and I think that’s been really good, so some people will say ‘I know this, I feel comfortable, I’ll get two or three acts that I know’, but they’re going to get a lot that they don’t know.”
He concluded by saying that “I think that’s really given a fresh energy to Cat Laughs, I’m really happy with it, the last few years, for me, have been really good.”