Kevin Bridges: Here If You Need Me comedy review – Exquisite Everybloke fare
Even-handed in his sympathy and withering criticism, the Glaswegian keeps both the punches and the laughs rolling
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Four years since Kevin Bridges last graced the Hydro, his show’s title reflects the fact that so few comedians can make an arena seem as intimate as the Glaswegian. His relaxed openness and down-to-earth authenticity isn’t wholly to his advantage, reliably encouraging more audience interjections than most comics playing rooms this size experience. However, playfully acknowledging his millionaire status with a canny tradesman’s strategy for inhibiting the obscene wealth of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bridges still retains that Everybloke relatability that first established the newly self-styled ‘Big Kev’ as a generational stand-up talent.
He might be globetrotting, staying in swanky American hotels with a bar in the middle of the swimming pool, observing the nouveau riche tackiness without much judgement, save the temptation it places on a full bladder. Yet he’s still mostly focused on taking the piss, revving up a bigoted redneck in his warped fantasies of Britain bowing down to sharia law. Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell are also roundly mocked for the latter’s indiscreet largesse with SNP funds. But there’s heartfelt admiration in Bridges anointing him a ‘legend!’
Approaching his 40th birthday, it seems incredible that this father-of-one can continue to draw so deep from the nostalgia well of his own Clydebank schooldays. Yet even with well-worn routine premises such as the big television that got wheeled into the classroom or the juvenile frustration of waiting for porn facilitated by a dial-up modem, his mastery of blunt, exquisite phrasing and gift for a unique visual image render these potentially clichéd tropes if not exactly fresh, then satisfyingly distinctive.
The latter routine is part of broader reflection on technological developments that finds him hilariously building a head of steam and losing a battle for supremacy with his phone. Employing tech and mental health as a way to alternately bash and defend the Boomer generation and Gen Z, Bridges is admirably even-handed. He’s a defender of the elderly in their persecution by daytime television and for the young team in their doomscrolling. Ultimately though, he’s only loyal to the laughs and cutting in his criticism of all and sundry.
With specific regard to neurodiversity, he’s sublimely dismissive, encapsulating the faddishness of various conditions in a single pithy line disguised as enquiring crowd work. Reducing his no doubt luxurious home to a playground for his childlike way of getting about the place, he’s casually, off-handedly disclosing of his vulnerabilities, making light of issues that other comics would grandstand or opine about, and all the funnier for it. At the beginning of his tour, some of the segues are somewhat abrupt, requiring smoother passage. Yet Bridges’ chuckling good humour, ability to roll with the punches of whatever the crowd yells at him and recourse to solid football metaphors shows him to be impressively match fit nonetheless, whatever the personal trainer he so disparages might say about him.
Kevin Bridges: Here If You Need Me on tour until Saturday 20 February; reviewed at OVO Hydro, Glasgow; picture: Andy Hollingworth.