Kevin Bridges review, steamroller standup is a joy but what’s with the £10 cloakroom charge?

Hammersmith Apollo, London In his tour Here If You Need Me, the comic makes laugh-out-loud look easy with jokes about conjugal argy-bargy, smutty downloads, and a bit of politics

I s there a better no-frills standup at work today than Kevin Bridges ? You’d struggle to find a more unfussily funny demonstration of the art form’s traditional virtues than at the Glaswegian’s new touring set. It’s a consistently laugh-out-loud suite of observational material on subjects comics have addressed since time immemorial: nostalgia, marital dispute, the latest cultural trends, alongside, as Ben Elton used to have it, a little bit of politics, too. Bridges really does have the X factor, and, without him ever seeming to stretch himself, Here If You Need Me is a steamroller 75 minutes of standup.

For me, it needed to be, after being hit by a £10-10 pounds!, cloakroom charge because my innocuous wee bag (a notebook, a novel, a pair of glasses) was apparently too incendiary to be allowed into the venue. Oh that Bridges would turn his satirical eye on that racket. But the show starts with more obvious targets: Donald Trump, whose “negotiating” techniques our host burlesques in a violent dialogue with his electrician; and Benjamin Netanyahu, pausing before another act of destruction to check out Bridges’ Instagram feed.

That latter bit features in a wider routine on celebs “using their platform” to promote political causes, and the counter-argument that it’s just virtue signalling. In the face of all that, on which he has a witheringly amusing last word, Bridges retreats into less contentious territory. One very droll skit from this father to a young son ribs the newfound milestone of the nursery graduation. Another looks back to his own youth at the dawn of the internet, downloading smutty pictures, and rapidly multiplying viruses, on to “Big Dell”, the family home computer.

Maybe this material, which develops into a routine about teaching his ageing mum to use technology, paddles in over-familiar comedic shallows. But Bridges fishes there for a new and pertinent catch, as with the sly reversal that turns a joke about online shopping into a paean for real-world connection (while pretending to do the opposite). Likewise, you could see later material on the Bridges household’s conjugal argy-bargy as old-school ’er-indoors shtick. And so it is. But there’s often more going on, too, some strand of social satire or surprising nuance at play, as per the gag about mansplaining while his wife drives him to the pub.

Bridges’ trick is to present, in both form and content, as a traditionally male, no-nonsense standup while delivering punchlines that reveal a cheerfully engaged, open-minded and egalitarian fellow. That’s apparent in his gag about school kids identifying as cats, and all the more so in his belter of a closing set piece, proposing a brilliantly basic solution to the problem of the super-rich (the profiteers from his venue’s cloakroom included, I hope). Authoritative, generous with his amusement at all he surveys and as brilliantly blunt as only the Glasgow-accented can be, Bridges shepherds us through this tour d’horizon of his life and world via laugh after irresistible laugh.