Kevin Bridges: Class act

Social class is a curiously persistent subject in stand-up. Whether it’s Jack Dee openly deriding 'chavs’, or Josie Long gently tickling liberal, middle class sensibilities, the spectre of class consciousness continues to haunt the comedy club in a way that’s now unfashionable in many other arenas. But while old hands like Billy Connolly and Alexei Sayle still fly the flag for working class (or ex-working class) comedians, there are few prominent young comics ready to take that flag up themselves.

Enter Kevin Bridges, whose Fringe debut this year sold out within days of the tickets being released. The excitement is largely down to a storming eight-minute set on the BBC showcase Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, where Bridges stood out as much for his unabashedly working class persona as for his obvious talent. Bridges' strong, pointedly enunciated, Glaswegian vowel sounds and deadpan delivery allowed him to wring comedy from such commonplace statements as “I was standing at a bus stop – waiting on a bus.” Elsewhere he spoke of his upbringing in Glasgow’s deprived Clydebank area, where his social position was somewhere between the kids who came back to school after the holidays “with a tan and a new satchel,” and those who came “with a black eye and a new second name.”

I meet Bridges at the Blackfriar’s pub in Glasgow, where he first cut his teeth as a compere early in his young career. He’s an amiable and thoughtful 22-year-old, assured but consistently self-effacing. He’s also a much faster talker in person than he is on stage, waxing lyrically and speedily on every subject I raise.

“People say I’ve got a deadpan style, but in the beginning I was quite – almost Lee Evans, really fast.” he laughs. But when gigging away from Scotland, Bridges realised, “you’ve got to slow down and enunciate your words. Obviously on stage your voice is your tool, it’s the only thing you’ve got, so you need to be understood.”

Bridges is keen not to “play the working class card, because that’s been done, hasn’t it?” – and he acknowledges that class is a more fluid, less definite thing these days. “I don’t think there’s anybody who can’t afford a pair of shoes, or is still grateful there’s food on the table.” Even so, “my mum’s a home help, and my dad’s unemployed on medical grounds. So I grew up with that,” he says. And initially, he saw this as a barrier to any sort of media career, stand-up included.

“I suppose [stand-up] started off as quite a working-class thing, I mean you look at Billy Connolly,” he says. “But then it’s become a lot more student, like guys with degrees, like Stewart Lee. So it’s a lot more intellectual these days. And I think the thing with stand-ups is that they never fit in. There’s that whole thing, that you don’t feel you fit in, as a person, and people channel that. And I think that being a working class guy, at the Festival....” He stops mid-thought.

“I read Frank Skinner’s autobiography and I suppose that was the only thing that kind of hit home. Him being a working class guy, we had so much in common. He was just the guy that acted up in the classroom and all that, and I just thought: it can be done. You don’t have to be a guy in a drama school to go and try stand-up.”

It certainly says something about the class shift in the comedy world over recent decades, that a young man can now feel excluded from it because he doesn’t have a degree. Could Bridges have gone to university?

“I could have been a lot better academically at school,” he tells me; Bridges' sense of humour often got him into trouble, because he would “do anything to get a laugh. You’d gladly sit on your own, doing the punishment exercise, writing the lines, but it was worth it because it was funny.” He left with three Highers, “not quite enough to get into uni. So it was that whole thing, too thick for uni, but too arrogant for a call centre.” Once he’d got over his reservations about it, stand-up seemed a good option.

His first gig at the Stand in Glasgow “went really well, and being the kind of glass half-empty guy that I am, the pessimist, I thought: right, first gig’s gone well, that’s a bad sign. I need to die on my arse for the first two years before I get good.” But fortunately, it wasn’t to work out like that. “It’s always been like this,” he says, angling his hand to indicate a slow but steady career rise. “But it’s like the game Jenga, you keep putting stuff on top.” Another mime indicates just how precarious he thinks this strategy is.

Bridges still lives with his parents in Clydebank, and plans to stay in Glasgow when he gets his own place later this year. He’s keen not to lose his identity as a stand-up, and “it’s good for inspiration, you can still see a street brawl at half past one in the morning.” But he repeatedly stresses how keen he is to push himself out of his comfort zone whenever he can.

“I’d never pigeonhole myself, because I think it’s far too early in my career, to get shaped into one particular style. I mean, I’ve done my own life experiences, that doesn’t mean...I could branch out, be an anarchist, man!” He laughs, almost apologetically. Is he an anarchist? “I dunno, I mean, I always look for the flaw, the conspiracy theory. I’ve just read Nineteen Eighty-Four, so I suppose I’m a kinda New Age, jumping-on-the-bandwagon anarchist. The kind of anarchist that the proper anarchists are rebelling against.”

Nevertheless, Bridges has some strongly-felt political opinions. “I suppose when you see, like, the Homecoming Scotland campaign, I’ve got a couple of jokes on that, how they’re trying to create Scotland as this great....” He trails off. “But there’s places in the East End of Glasgow, where the life expectancy’s 47. It’s third-world. You know, it’s that whole thing, they try and plaster over it, like when London gets the Olympics, so they just brush Hackney to the side. I suppose I just disagree with that hypocrisy, that’s where the class thing comes in.”

Bridges stares into the middle distance and appears to ponder. “I dunno, I think there’s not too much to rebel about these days. Everyone’s just kind of ground down, it’s just like, total apathy, with politicians. I think the days of the rebels are done,” he says wistfully.

“So it’s just like, trying to find something to take a stand against,” he continues. “We need something to happen.”

And in a small way, with Bridges’ confident arrival on the increasingly genteel Fringe comedy scene, perhaps something has.