Australian comedian Sam Campbell does not do things the normal way. At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last summer he put only one poster up in the city and it did not even have his name or venue on it. He must have been doing something right though. He won Dave’s Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Show.
He finally has his first Soho run in London since his victory and is still not playing by conventional rules. No press tickets were available, instead cold hard plastic had to be handed over in exchange for a ticket. The good news is that the Edinburgh judges were not wrong. He is more than worth the entry fee.
His speciality is a mixture of surrealism, one-liners and onscreen mash-ups of films and adverts. There are hints of Harry Hill here, splashes of fellow Aussie award winner Sam Simmons there. British stand-up Mat Ewins has a similar fondness for blink-and-you’ll-miss-it superfast multi-media humour. But make no mistake. Campbell is clearly a one-off.
There is no overarching theme to this hour of divine madness. He simply stirs together a series of disparate observations to form an enticing fun-flavoured soup. He is definitely committed. It takes a high degree of artistic courage to start by walking onstage with a cracked egg on the end of a pole waving it wordlessly at the crowd.
From this unapologetically zany start we get a mix of jokes that vary from the mainstream to the oblique. “On the way here I got nutmegged by Jack Grealish” falls somewhere between the two extremes. Occasionally he will pull notes from his pockets or check something with his techie, but nothing is quite what it seems.
Campbell, who has a recurring role in the Sky comedy Bloods, clearly puts a huge effort into being this off-the-wall. One routine deep dives into the font changes on a cereal box. Campbell scrutinises the variations at a granular level and then tops an already hilarious riff with an unlikely conspiracy theory for bonus laughs.
The secret of Campbell’s success may be that while he is absurd he is also mostly accessible. His joke about Paddington being found at a completely different train station and his prank of putting doctored footage in DVD cases have an immediate playful appeal.
It helps that the boyish performer is instantly amiable. Not many acts could get their audience to cheer or shout down a selection of pictures of feet. His excitable style may not be for everyone. For balance the woman next to me was so stony faced she might have arrived direct from Mount Rushmore. But she was very much in the minority.
Soho Theatre, to Saturday; sohotheatre.com
