Nerd Alert! This year’s Bristol Comedy Festival competition featured six finalists, all from the West of England area or connected to the area. While there wasn’t a specified preplanned theme to the evening, two themes, perhaps not entirely unconnected, did emerge. Comics drilling into unusual interests and neurodiversity. The result was a high standard of stand-up finding humour in unexpected nooks and crannies.
First up was Charlie Bowers, who was impressively slow burn and so low energy one might have worried that after skilful compere (and hard-working festival organiser) Burt Williamson’s warm-up Bowers might have sucked the life out of the room. But instead after opening with some crowdwork about mobile phones he worked the crowd into a gentle frenzy riffing on tariffs and contract perks.
Who would haver thought that chatting about the relative merits of 02 and EE could be so entertaining? In fact Bowers set a high bar for the night (or should that be five bars?) and was judged to be the winner (by me, I was the judge – audience votes had counted in the heats but as Burt said sagely, audience members can’t be trusted…).
After this strong start, second act Aayush Rathi also had a touch of the geek about him in a good way, self-consciously highlighting his social awkwardness and getting laughs out of being a loner. After establishing his onstage personality though, his material was quite wide-ranging, touching on the idea of people giving away “free hugs” to the notion that shoplifters tend to look hot. I wasn’t quite sold on his thesis about testicle droopage, but there was clearly a comic brain at work here, if it didn’t always land on the right punchlines.
Adam Jones continued the theme of pedantic dweebishness, taking issue with Jamie Oliver’s recipes. How exactly do you add “approximately” five garlic cloves? Jones soon homed in on the issue of autism, recalling doing a test in which the answer options were “sometimes, always, never” and nitpicking about how often “sometimes” actually is. I guess if it’s a test for autism and you nitpick about the answer options you don’t really need to complete the test to get your diagnosis. Jones seemed to grow in confidence as the set went on and ended on a high. Some top-overthinking here might have landed him third spot, except there wasn’t a third spot.
For a final which was heavy on neurodiversity it was a little light on gender diversity, but comic Jess Lo went some way to correct the balance with a smart set about everything from her Chinese heritage to Disney cartoons no longer giving lead roles to straight men to the true meaning of boobs. Lo expounded at length on her theory about what women’s breasts actually mean in a way that was both funny and very different to Tim Minchin’s famous song on the same subject. Another act who left a strong impression.
Joel Dommett grew up and went to school near Bristol and, erk, sorry, no, he wasn’t in the final, but close your eyes and you might think he was as soundalike Tom Hutchinson had an identical accent. The difference was that Hutchinson spoke at about five times the speed of Dommett. This was comedy with the foot on the verbal accelerator from the get-go as Hutchinson spoke about his ADHD and the medication he takes and how it makes him want to be creative.
He had some good gags and demonstrated some neat sound effects, including a sample of his dad getting up from an armchair. But most of all he was a formidable force of nature that, to some extent, beat the audience into submission. And me too, i couldn’t stop myself from awarding him second place. Seriously though, Hutchinson is a memorable stand-up and if Joel Dommett’s voiceover agent is reading this I think we’ve found a cheaper stand-in.
Hutchinson was inevitably a tough act to follow, but luckily Callum MacKenzie also had a fair bit of energy so that there was not a gear-change contrast. He also had a nice Milton Jones-style callback about Tesco Mobile, referencing Charlie Bowers – it’s always good to know that acts are watching other acts. MacKenzie’s schtick was that he can’t quite grow up and is a people pleasing kid trapped in a Ninja Turtles T-shirt and a thirtysomething body. He did a pretty good job pleasing this full house on a night that suggested that there is no shortage of comedy talent busting to break through in and around Bristol.
Picture of Charlie Bowers by Toby Brooks
