Winnipeg Comedy Festival: Galas at the Burton Cummings Theatre

We get the same question most Aprils: is there anything on this week besides the Jets, and can we get tickets. The answer is usually the Winnipeg Comedy Festival, and yes, if you move before the Thursday night show sells out.

What a festival week actually looks like

Comedian Lara Rae and CBC Radio producer Tom Anniko started the festival in 2002, and it has run every spring since out of the Gas Station Arts Centre, the small theatre and production company that still produces it. Most of the week happens there: workshops, late shows, and the kind of sets that never make television. The part that does make television is the run of CBC galas, taped a few blocks away at the Burton Cummings Theatre and edited down into hour-long specials that air on CBC through the year. Close to a hundred hours of those galas have aired since 2002, which the network has called its highest-rated comedy series. Lara Rae stepped back after 2023, and Dean Jenkinson has run the festival as artistic director since.

2026 was the 25th edition, and it leaned into that: a run from Monday, April 20 through Sunday, April 26, with an anniversary Mega Show recorded for broadcast on the Thursday night, April 23, at 7:30 at the Burton Cummings Theatre. No 2027 week has been announced yet. Going by the last two years, expect something in the back half of April; 2025 ran April 29 to May 4, a few days later again.

Two venues, one short walk apart

The Gas Station Arts Centre sits at 445 River Avenue, on the Osborne Village side of the river, in a converted filling station that gives the place its name. The Burton Cummings Theatre is downtown at 364 Smith Street, a 1906 vaudeville house built as the Walker Theatre and now a designated historic site with a lobby that still shows its age in a good way. Getting between them on a show night means crossing the Assiniboine, either on foot over the Osborne Street Bridge or by transit: the D19 Corydon runs from our end of Crescentwood to its terminal on Kennedy Street, a few blocks' walk from the Theatre's Smith Street doors.

Where to stay for the festival

Our three-bedroom home is in Crescentwood, on the same side of the Assiniboine as Osborne Village and the Gas Station Arts Centre, so no bridge stands between us and the Gas Station Theatre; it is a walk along Wellington Crescent and Stradbrook Avenue that runs closer to twenty minutes than it looks on a map, but it stays flat the whole way. The Burton Cummings Theatre, across the river in downtown, is not a walk from here; it is a short D19 ride, the same route that drops you a few blocks from the Theatre's Smith Street doors. Neither venue needs a car for most of the week, which matters more than it sounds like once you have tried to park downtown on a gala night. The Thursday and Friday galas are the shows that sell out first, so a booking built around a specific night is worth locking in once the dates are posted rather than after. Daytime highs are normally climbing into the mid-teens Celsius by late April, warm enough that the walk to the Gas Station Theatre is pleasant rather than something to brace for, though a Winnipeg spring can still throw a cold evening into the mix. Check our Airbnb listing for what is open that week.