For a stand-up comedian, the instant gratification of making an audience laugh is addictive but daunting. When Scotland’s funnyman Kevin Bridges came off of tour and buckled down to write his autobiography, he found himself moving at a different pace.
“If I sat down with my notepad and wrote all my ideas and [tried to work out] my routine, then there’s that pressure that every four or five lobs need to be funny. But when you write a book, you just tell the story — you don’t feel under pressure to get the laughs,” Bridges told tabloid! before the book’s October release.
The book, named We Need to Talk About... Kevin Bridges, chronicled the 28-year-old’s journey.
“It’s a title that we kind of plagiarised from a high school massacre, so it should be light-hearted enough,” Bridges joked.
“I got asked to write a story about my life so far, because I started stand-up at 17, straight after school. Penguin approached me, just saying, ‘We’d like to hear the whole story,’ so I took a year off from touring in the UK [the tour ended in Australia] and just sort of wrote the book. It’s just basically stories about growing up in school and on the stand-up circuit.”
Since then, Bridges has been known for his televised comedy specials, performing on various programmes including the British stand-up series, Live at the Apollo. His 2012 series, Kevin Bridges: What’s the Story?, gave insight into his inspirations and routines through its six-episode run.
On December 12, he will perform at the Dubai World Trade Centre in front of a sold-out crowd, his second time in the region since 2008. The gig will be his last big stop of the year, with 2015 seeing him tour around the UK and Ireland.
“I always think that when you’re doing gigs abroad, it’s always good to come two or three days before a show just to go out and see the place and then you end up doing loads of material just about the area that you’re in,” Bridges said.
“I’m going to come over a few days before [the Dubai show] and go out to the water park and all that, get sunburn.”
Despite this, Bridges said there are never great differences between regions, and that a gig is a gig wherever he goes. His Dubai show, he added, will be a greatest hits mash-up of old and new material.
“I know the last time we were in the Middle East, we were told to watch content a little, but it was just maybe some stronger language or certain issues to avoid,” he said.
“There are references you have to watch out for, but that’s just obvious stuff — you don’t go and talk about a British TV show in New York. And you don’t say you’re going outside to smoke a fag in America, I’ve learned that as well.”
So how do you make Bridges himself laugh? Bring up the fact that he was recently voted the most influential Scottish person on Twitter.
“I enjoy Twitter. You don’t have to put much thought in it, you can just be sitting in an airport and [be] like, I’ve just seen a guy buying a Diet Coke and a packet of Mentos in the airport — you’re never going to go on stage and say that: ‘Oh, guess what I’ve seen last week?’ — but you can do a tweet: ‘Terror alert, Mentos and Diet Coke in an airport.’”
At the same time, he finds that people tend to take his offhanded Tweets too seriously.
“The amount of pressure that people put you under… People put an expectation on it. You’ll just Tweet a stupid wee remark, and then people will be going, ‘Thought you were supposed to be a [expletive] comedian?’ I don’t take it too seriously, social media.”
