Here’s how the Edinburgh fringe usually figures in a young comedian’s calendar. For 11 months, they conceive, prep and preview their show with the festival in mind. Then the best prepared of them, the most finely honed, might be in with a shout of winning standup’s biggest prize – the Dave’s Edinburgh comedy award, the so-called Oscars of comedy, formerly held aloft by the Steve Coogans, Leagues of Gentlemen and Hannah Gadsbys of yore.
That’s the convention. But whatever else Sam Campbell may be – trickster, loose cannon, terroriser of critics like myself – conventional he’s not. Campbell is the leftfield 30-year-old Aussie act who departed this year’s fringe with its most coveted prize in his backpack. In a field of nominees that included Jordan Gray, Liz Kingsman and Seann Walsh, his win was unexpected. It seems all the more surprising when I talk to him in what he says is his first ever face-to-face interview, and he tells me he came to Edinburgh reluctantly this summer, and without a coherent show to speak of.
“My manager was putting pressure on me to do the festival,” says Campbell, sitting opposite me in a cafe in London’s Soho. “But I said no. Edinburgh can be a real slog.” Two factors changed his mind. The first: “I wanted to use it to get material for Melbourne” – that being the Melbourne comedy festival, where Campbell has a devoted following after winning its prestigious Barry Award (as it was then called) in 2018. “I had half a show’s worth of new material, so I had to come up with another half.” He arrived in Edinburgh with loose-fitting routines some way short of cohering into a proper performance. “I know some comics like to freeze a show in time for Edinburgh and be done with it. But I spent the festival adding stuff in and changing stuff around.”
The other clincher was being able to perform for only half of the festival’s duration. Campbell’s show didn’t open till the fringe was two weeks underway – a breach of convention many thought might disqualify him from the main awards. “But it helped,” he says. “Because I came in for the second half when people were flagging a bit, and I had fresh legs.” Some have hailed his win as a game-changer: will any comic ever again commit to the whole month-long endurance test when a slim fortnight can be so fruitful?
“We’ll see if that happens,” says Campbell, clearly sceptical. “I think people are just addicted to it and obsessed with it.” He pauses and jokes: “I’m going to do longer next year. I’m going to do six weeks. Just to prove I have it in me – and to make up the time!”
No one doubts Campbell has it in him: he’s paid his dues at Edinburgh. I first saw him there in 2016 struggling to keep his oddball comedy afloat in front of a single-figure audience. At the last fringe pre-Covid, I was part of the (much bigger) crowd for another of his midnight hours, when Campbell pointed a pistol at an image of me on-screen and blew my brains out. It was quite the out-of-body experience for this comedy critic at the time – but just another irreverent in-joke for the gadfly comic. I’d never written a bad word about him, as Campbell cheerfully admits – but “I guess I just find that kind of stuff really funny”.
By the time his 2022 appearance rolled around, Campbell was becoming the comedian’s comedian, his auditoria packed with fellow standups – as was his 2019 Channel 4 short Get Real Dude, an off-beam sketch show co-starring Jamie Demetriou, Charlotte Ritchie, David O’Doherty and other luminaries of 21st-century comedy. “I’ve always loved collaboration” says Campbell, who started professional life as a sketch comic, and whose solo work isn’t always as solo as you’d expect.
This year’s fringe show planted several of his sidekicks (comics Mark Silcox, Dan Rath and Paul Williams) as disruptors in the audience – one of whom, Silcox, interrupts our interview today, posing undercover as an adoring member of the public, to ask for Campbell’s autograph. I’m not meant to take it seriously, but neither is Campbell remotely going to acknowledge that it’s a stunt. That’s the insouciant space his comedy inhabits, where anything could happen and, when it does, well it’s up to you to work out why.
“My mind is a prison full of crazy ideas,” ran the much-quoted opening line of his award-winning set. “I think there’s going to be a jailbreak!” There duly was, as visual gags on PowerPoint about the Weetabix font or the marketing of Bratz dolls piled high atop observational comedy gone haywire, with a side serving of random visits from a caped interplanetary hypnotherapist. Campbell makes no effort, he tells me, to make his live shows cohere. “When I do one, I just want to throw down, do whatever I want and act a bit insanely. And I don’t know if it would feel as genuine if I was following a script.”
When I first saw Campbell perform his oddball brand of humour, it was questionable whether it would ever find a mainstream audience. Baby-faced and never quite at ease, he made for a disconcerting stage presence, one moment confrontational, the next looking like he might burst out crying. And he seemed to revel in destabilising his audience or short-circuiting his own comedy. Throw in a propensity for performing at midnight, and a dash of imagined violence against critics, and the impression emerges of an act keen to keep the mainstream at arm’s length.
Not so, says Campbell. “I’m not out there trying to be this cool guy. I don’t think I’m that introspective. I just try to make stuff that appeals to me.” His boyish, slightly vulnerable demeanour might be explained, he ventures, by the fact that “I was very small growing up” – a feature he thinks contributed to his pursuing comedy. “My parents were legitimately going to give me horse hormones to make me grow, because I was really small for a long time.” And as for his material sometimes landing with a bit of a clunk: “You’ve got to learn on the job,” he says, “and especially earlier on, I was still figuring stuff out.”
He adds: “My friend saw me in Edinburgh the first year I did it. He sat next to an old couple and, at the end, the old man looked at the old lady and said, ‘Absolute gobbledygook!’ I think now I’m slowly getting away from that. But if a few people still think it’s gobbledygook, I don’t mind.” And isn’t the gobbledygook sometimes just a bit intentional? “Maybe secretly. But I could never admit that to myself.”
Either way, it’s now Edinburgh award-winning gobbledygook. The significance of that to this comedy scholar – who during our conversation name-checks Lee Evans, Aussie duo Lano & Woodley and the vintage US performer Shelley Berman – is in his joining the award’s illustrious pantheon of past champs. “It’s cool to be among those people,” says Campbell. As for the professional opportunities the prize may open up, he has – as one of the seemingly least strategic and careerist comics I’ve ever met – less to say. Sample expression of Campbell’s current ambitions: “Now that I’ve become kind of a celebrity, I think I’m going to hopefully get to make at least a something.” Pause. “I don’t know what you’re supposed to say,” he eventually adds.
Campbell is already a regular in the Sky sitcom Bloods, and wrote for the recent Channel 4 puppet show Don’t Hug Me, I’m Scared. Following on from his Get Real Dude short, he’d like to make his own show, but not “in the sketch space”. In what space, then? “In outer space!” he replies. It’ll more likely be in Britain: the Queensland native proudly shows me his “global talent” visa for the UK, meaning our islands are now his oyster.
“I try to do everything once,” he says. “I wouldn’t usually do an interview, for example, but it’s good to try stuff out and see what kind of things I’m into.” Now it’s my turn to feel the pressure: screw this interview up, and Campbell might never give another one. “Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe this article will be the scoop of a lifetime!”
• Sam Campbell is at EartH, London, on 28 October
