Kevin Bridges is not the first person to note that comedians’ routines are now expected to hit higher standards of morality and accuracy than politicians’ speeches.
But that scrutiny shouldn’t worry him, as the 39-year-old Scot speaks more common sense than most public figures. Despite his acknowledged success, Bridges remains wedded to his working-class Clydebank roots and the fine tradition of taking the piss to ensure no one’s mad behaviour goes unchallenged. It’s an authentic brand of straight talking that could give populism a good name.
Paddling in the waters of politics, Bridges doesn’t let some positions go unmocked, such as the excesses of the ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric, the MAGA belief that Birmingham is an Islamic caliphate out of bounds to infidels, or the idea that teachers must respect their pupils who self-identify as cats.
It’s significant that this teasing comes from him, an otherwise apolitical voice, as he’s not preaching to a crowd who came to have their liberal opinions reinforced. Instead, it’s just part of his overarching aim to cut through the nonsense. AI and online misinformation are clear targets, including the plague of toxic masculinity, spread by social media, which he witnesses at the gym he sporadically frequents.
The pretentious middle classes whose world he now inhabits get skewered, too, such as the parents who post ‘nursery graduation’ celebrations as if their five-year-old had achieved something meaningful. Bridges himself has spent the four years since he last toured the UK bringing up his son, but parenting represents only a minute part of this show.
The list of topics he does cover does not, on the face of it, look too inspiring: daytime TV, accessing porn via dial-up internet, older generations struggling with tech… But proving there’s no such thing as a hack topic, only hack treatments of them, he finds freshness in each subject, whether through slightly absurd exaggerations, lively act-outs or a different way of seeing things.
His routine about his frustration trying to teach his mum to order from Amazon, for example, ends with a rather touching reflection on whether the older generation are on to something with their way of doing things. And speaking of tech giants, Bridges has a memorable and imaginatively stupid suggestion to put mega-rich tycoons like Jeff Bezos in their place.
In each routine every detail is just right, from an unpleasant truth you probably never thought of about all-inclusive holidays to differences of opinion with his wife.
There is no peacocking structure, theme or artistic cleverness that we critics are presumed, with some justification, to be impressed by. But when pure, unadorned stand-up is done as assuredly as this, no bells and whistles are needed.
Fine work, too, from Evaldas Karosas in support, with distinctive and ever-entertaining stories of abject poverty and the mindset he brought with him from his native Lithuania.
• Kevin Bridges: Here If You Need Me is on tour until February. Kevin Bridges tour dates
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