Review: David O’Doherty & others, Bristol Comedy Garden 2023 – ‘The air was thick with laughter’

Queens Square welcomed a sea of tropical shirts and plaid jumpsuits yesterday, all headed for a red-hot night of comedy.

Charged by sunshine and tinnies, the audience at the third instalment of Bristol Comedy Garden were quick to fill the Big Top tent with laughter.

Host and former Bristolian, John Robins kicked off the evening by whipping up the crowd into a giddy debate on the city’s failing transport, riffing with the audience as they picked apart his carbon footprint.

The rest of the line-up treaded into broader social commentary, reflecting a confused cultural time.

Bristol Comedy Garden 2023 – photo: Ella Calland

Jokes tangled up in society’s anxieties and hypocrisies were met with a sigh of relief, instead of sinking dread. As headliner David O’Doherty says, it turns out laughter is the best medicine, when it is no longer “a menacing cloud of germs”.

Australian rising star Ray Badran brought anecdotal comedy to an absurd level. A fish out of water in the UK, Badran’s meandering take on Tesco deals and baffled response to coats struck a chord with an audience drawn in by his nasal tone of wonder.

Badran’s performance felt instinctive at times, as if he plucked random thoughts from the air. One particularly jarring joke about a dolphin’s sexual desires struck the audience like a lightning bolt.

Self-defined as the only person to ‘willingly move from Paris to Birmingham’, Celya AB delivered a set on the blinding ironies in our society with casual charm.

The crowd inside the Big Top – photo: Ella Calland

Though she claimed that jokes at our expense were ‘punching down’, AB proceeded to annihilate the unsettling contradictions in British culture, comparing widespread colonisation to the phrase ‘excuse me, can I just squeeze past’.

Bridget Christie performed a public service with her menopausal commentary, breaking down the obscure condition that only affects “1 in 1 women”.

Christie’s hilarious swipes at misogyny were a highlight, particularly her side-splitting impression of getting into a horse costume on a night out for protection, and her celebration of the fact she has finally achieved the “self-confidence of a middle-aged, balding, overweight man”.

David O’Doherty’s headline performance was a delightful stream of consciousness, punctured with musical comedy and a tiny keyboard. His dramatic, visceral song about the vulnerable experience of going to the toilet without your phone, alone with your thoughts was a doozy.

Bristol Comedy Garden 2019, Queen Square – photo: ShotAway

Both O’Doherty and Christie dived into the nuanced complexities of woke culture, climate dread, and the ‘you can’t say anything anymore’ movement.

Christie joked about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Vin Diesel as an entity, due to their mutually dangerous climate connotations, while O’Doherty belted a climate deniers’ anthem that professed climate change to be “much too inconvenient to be true”.

As the temperature rose and the air was thick with laughter, it truly felt like a new climate for comedy had arrived.

There is no denying the world is burning, but that won’t stop us laughing in a boiling hot Big Top.

Bristol Comedy Garden 2023 lineup – poster: 57 Festivals

Bristol Comedy Garden presented by heycar returns to Queen Square from June 14 to 18. For tickets and more information, visit www.bristolcomedygarden.co.uk.

Main photo: Ella Calland

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