Kevin Bridges’ new show restores observational comedy’s edge. It’s a genre with a bad rap, sullied by association with Michael McIntyre and co, seen as tame and easy. Bridges does little here to counter the latter charge. But there’s nothing tame about his set, which addresses standard topics like house parties, technology and holidays with a pugnacity that’s very Glaswegian. Take his joke about being obliged, by someone who doesn’t understand his accent, to repeat a meaningless social nicety. In other comics’ hands, it’d be a joke about their social awkwardness. In Bridges’, it’s about impatience and fantasies of violence.
There’s more of that, in a short set that’s more personal and less political than its predecessor. I regret that emphasis: Bridges makes for a sharp social commentator, as per his proposal to kickstart the economy by raising the dole to £1,000 a week. But the personal material is often just as funny. I relished his speculations, after a round-the-world phone call to fix his malfunctioning PC, as to who on Earth might have “deconfigurated his client ID” in the first place.
Likewise the sequence about Bridges’ slimming regime, in which he lies to his food diary: “Is this the truth?” asks his dietician. “Naw, mate,” says Bridges, “the truth would break your fucking heart.”
The 28-year-old has staked out very funny territory here in the overlap between scorn of the highfalutin and satire on his own conservatism. Sometimes that shades into cliches about working-class anti-intellectualism, as when he encounters a dog named after Diego Rivera, or dismisses all the art in a gallery as “shite”. More often, it enables blunt, self-amused and highly self-assured comedy, as with the fantastic skit about 10-year-old Bridges on a sleepover, realising with disgust that other families have different domestic habits to his own. It’s mainstream comedy, then, but with very sharp elbows.
• Until 19 September. Box office: 0844-249 4300. Then touring.
