What does an Edinburgh comedy award win mean for Sam Campbell? And what does a Sam Campbell win mean for the award? This most coveted trophy in live comedy has propelled dozens of comics into the big league since its foundation in that Year Zero of alternative comedy, 1981, when the winners – featuring Stephen Fry and Emma Thompson, among others – were Cambridge Footlights. Steve Coogan, the League of Gentlemen and Hannah Gadsby later joined the pantheon, much to the delight of the organisers, it’s assumed: the award’s prestige is sustained by its winners’ subsequent success. So can we now expect Campbell to follow in these clown-sized footsteps?
His win, announced on Saturday, was both likely and unexpected. Likely, because the Aussie won the equivalent award in 2018 at the Melbourne comedy festival, hot on the heels of Gadsby and Sam Simmons – both of whom promptly did the double by winning in Edinburgh too. Campbell didn’t emulate the feat. His popularity in the UK has been slow to build: when I first saw him in Edinburgh, when he’d already won the director’s choice award at Melbourne, he was playing to a single-figure audience. His talent and distinctiveness was never in doubt – but would audiences fall into line behind it?
That’s where the unexpectedness comes in. Because Campbell is a maverick, not a crowd-pleaser; for a long time, indeed, he seemed wilfully to alienate his audience. His trickster shows, not unlike Simmons’ before him, set out to destabilise onlookers’ expectations, with their high levels of nervous tension, irregular rhythms and complete absence of certainty as to what the 30-year-old might throw at you next. In his prize-winning show, it might be a dotty PowerPoint on a screen, a surreal cameo from one of his repertoire of alt-comedy sidekicks (Mark Silcox, for example, as a planet-hopping hypnotherapist) or a straight standup routine such as the one about the too-talkative barber – albeit that, as delivered by this baby-faced oddball, those routines won’t end up seeming very straight at all.
Even the scheduling signals nonmainstream: both Campbell’s last two Edinburgh shows started after midnight. Then there’s the critic-baiting: in his 2018 show The Trough, he blew the brains out of my digital image, live onstage. This is not the behaviour of an act courting conventional success – and Campbell’s comedy is all the more intriguing for it.
I refer you to a comedy pilot he filmed for Channel 4, released to considerable buzz among comedy fans back in 2019. Get Real Dude is a fine showcase for the man’s qualities, with one offbeat, fragilely funny sketch after another. None of them goes in the direction you’re expecting, nor are any of them dispensable. The short is also crammed with hip comedy stars (Jamie Demetriou, Charlotte Ritchie, David O’Doherty), consolidating Campbell’s “comedian’s comedian” status whether or not the pilot took flight.
Channel 4 did not commission a full series. Now we’ll see whether the prestige that comes with an Edinburgh comedy award opens doors for Campbell into the mainstream – and if so, whether Campbell wishes to manoeuvre his impish and idiosyncratic brand of comedy through them.
