Comedian Kevin Bridges Is Back To The Jokes After Nearly Walking Away Forever

The life of a comedian is, more or less, the only one that Kevin Bridges has ever known. At just 17, the Scottish stand-up did his first ever gig, and his voice is still changing 13 years later.

"I just turned 30," Bridges says from a hotel in London, "and stand-up, it feels like an older person's game. I think the more you live life and the more stuff happens to you, the funnier you get and the more you've got to draw on." He adds, "I don't know if I've noticed myself changing because I'm the only person who's there at every single gig, so maybe people might say 'oh, you've got a different style now,' but you can't always talk about being 17."

Bridges is also taking on some heavier subject matter compared to his adolescent days, breaking out the political guns in these tumultuous times. "I think it's easier than ever to write material," he confesses, "but it's also hard because stuff that's going on is so extreme. Trump, for example, he's so hard to satirise. He's almost a parody of himself, so it can be hard to come up with an original outlook on things, rather than just going for an easy impression or something." Bridges says that while it was an interesting transition into political humour, he felt it was necessary to try and make the world that little bit more bearable. "People have paid to hear you, so number one is you need to make them laugh," he confidently asserts, "but if you can make a sort of give your audience something to think about, it defuses tension and I think it's healthy for society, to have people speaking about these things. And a comedy audience can be a really smart one; they can laugh while thinking 'this is really interesting, what this person is saying.'"

"I honestly thought I would never do stand-up again."

While Bridges has his radar locked on to the likes of Trump and Brexit, he acknowledges that it can all be a little too much sometimes. Even as a man versed in jest and satire, Bridges, like anyone up to date with the news, finds it difficult to reject pessimism. "I'll probably leave this interview to the news of another attack, you know?" he muses, "and it's hard to talk about that stuff on stage, but you have to mention it because every day there's conflict. In that respect, comedy is more important than it's ever been, even just for the escapism. Even if the person onstage isn't talking about what's going on, just to have the escape of someone making you laugh is what we need right now."

This attitude towards comedy hasn't always been an obvious one for Bridges. In fact, he deferred from comedy in 2016 after a gargantuan tour amassing nearly 500,000 punters. "I think it was the pressure;" he says. "You know, you work so hard just to get people to know who you are... and suddenly a few people are interested. Then your festival show blows up and then you're playing big theatres, then it's a DVD, which is great, but it means that material gets binned. So you have to start again: a new tour, trying to keep it as good as the last one, I didn't know how I could sustain it. So the year off, re-finding that essence of what I do that makes people laugh, that was vital to me." So what did he do on his year off? "I went to Madrid to learn Spanish and I actually went to college. It was almost as if I was placed under witness protection," he laughs.

The return to the stage in 2017 was by no means an easy one for Bridges, who admits, "I honestly thought I would never do stand-up again. I thought maybe I had bumped myself off at that point, so coming back to it in January was a huge thing for me." He says of that first show back, "It's the longest I've ever not done stand-up since I started. It was proper Eminem, 8 Mile stuff: just a wee 50 seater in the back of a pub. And even hearing my voice in the microphone again, being under the lights I was like 'shit, I feel like a proper amateur, doing this for the first time ever.' It all comes back to you after about a minute; you have this instinct that just gets up and running, but it was the most nervous I've ever been before a gig."

With the wheels well and truly back in motion, the comic is ready to connect with fans on a personal level. "Just tell 'em Tom Rogic is my hero," Bridges says when asked what he'd like Aussie fans to know about him. "He's an Australian soccer paying coming to play for Celtic and he's a legend." When told The Music don't exactly cover sport, he laughs before replying, "Mention Hilltop Hoods! I'm a big fan of them. They're Australian, aren't they?"

Kevin Bridges tours Australia: 9 Sep at Perth Exhibition and Convention Centre, 12 Sep at Thebarton Theatre Torensville, 13 Sep at Sydney Opera House, part of Just For Laughs, and 19 Sep at Hamer Hall, 21 Sep at QPAC Brisbane.