Sam Campbell (comedian)

From Queensland, Campbell performs stand-up comedy live as well as creating comedy web shows. He made a short series that was broadcast on Comedy Central Australia and guested on ABC TV's The Checkout.[1] In 2015 Campbell won Best Newcomer, then in 2018 the Most Outstanding Show award, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.[2]

Campbell was the winner of the main prize at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards at the 2022 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with his show simply entitled Comedy Show.[3] It was praised by the judges for its originality, surrealism and unexpected jokes.[4] The show was also well received by The Times who described "a nutball, but he controls his loopiness with deceptive precision” and also said that the show was "exhausting, exhilarating and a touch of genius".[5] Brian Logan in The Guardian said "Campbell's imagination produces wonderfully adhesive images... there is now and then a core of robust observational comedy beneath Campbell's loopiness... None of it has anything to do with anything: it's the incongruity, taken to uncommon lengths, that's funny".[6] Logan highlighted the fact that Campbell's award-winning show was only performed after midnight and only in the second half of the Edinburgh Fringe which displays an attitude which "signals nonmainstream".[7] The Daily Telegraph review mentioned "one-liners and absurdist whorls of madcap" delivered "with a casual, just-passing-the-time insouciance" that means the "amusement motors along so quickly, with such handbrake-turns of tone and for-the-hell-of-it bouts of recircling emphasis, it attains a runaway uncontrollable hilarity".[8]

In February 2023, Campbell was nominated at the UK National Comedy Awards in the Best Stand-up category for his show Comedy Show.[9]

In June 2023, Campbell was confirmed as a contestant on the sixteenth series of long-running Channel 4 comedy gameshow Taskmaster.[10]

Campbell told Taskmaster: The People's Podcast that he was born in the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland, Australia.[11] He was a small child growing up, and his parents considered placing him under growth hormone therapy.[12]

Campbell was still living in Queensland as of 2011, when he was a Queensland finalist for the national Raw Comedy competition,[13] but as of 2015 he had relocated to Sydney.[14] He later moved to the United Kingdom, having acquired a Global Talent visa in 2022.[12]

Campbell has questioned whether he is autistic but hasn't sought a diagnosis.[15]