Sam Campbell
Campbell wearing a motion capture suit, 2017
Born	19 September 1991 (age 32) Atherton Tableland, Queensland, Australia
Medium	Stand-up television
Genres	Surrealism, absurdism, observational

Samuel George Campbell (born 19 September 1991) is an Australian stand-up comedian and actor. He won the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Award in 2018 and the main prize at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival in 2022.

Career

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]

Campbell is part of the YouTube collective Skills In Time, with comedians Greg Larsen and Henry Stone.^[9]

In February 2023, Campbell was nominated at the UK National Comedy Awards in the Best Stand-up category for his show Comedy Show.^[10]

In June 2023, Campbell was confirmed as a contestant on the sixteenth series of long-running Channel 4 comedy gameshow Taskmaster.^[11] Campbell won the series.^[12]

In October 2023, Campbell announced his 2024 tour in the UK named Wobservations.^[13]

Personal life

Campbell told Taskmaster: The People's Podcast that he was born in the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland, Australia;^[14] on the Trusty Hogs podcast with Catherine Bohart and Helen Bauer, he mentioned the town of Lake Eacham, Queensland.^[15] On the Welcome to Meet You podcast, Campbell mentioned growing up around the regions of Yungaburra and Atherton. He went to high school in Bundaburg^[16]. He was a small child growing up, and his parents considered placing him under growth hormone therapy.^[17]

Campbell is from Queensland; he lived in Brisbane from the ages of 17 to 21,^[15] and in 2011 he was a Queensland finalist for the national Raw Comedy competition.^[18] By 2015 he had relocated to Sydney.^[19] He later moved to the United Kingdom, having acquired a Global Talent visa in 2022.^[17]

In his 2018 MICF show "The Trough", Campbell joked that although he has never been tested, he might be autistic.^[20]

Partial filmography

References