Sam Campbell (comedian)

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. In 2015 Campbell won Best Newcomer, then in 2018 the Most Outstanding Show award, at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

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. It was praised by the judges for its originality, surrealism and unexpected jokes. 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". 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". 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". 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".

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

Campbell frequently appears alongside Anne Edmonds as Connor Bidou, the son of her character Helen Bidou.

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

In 2023, Campbell was a contestant on the sixteenth series of Channel 4 comedy gameshow Taskmaster, winning the series.

In February 2024, Campbell was nominated in the Best TV Comic category and Best Breakthrough Act category at the Chortle Awards. He won in the Best Breakthrough Act category and was voted Comedian's Comedian by his peers.

In March 2024, it was announced that Campbell would be piloting a Channel 4 series called Make That Movie!, in which he will create films based on the dreams of strangers.

Since 2024, Campbell has co-hosted the Lucy & Sam's Perfect Brains podcast with comedian Lucy Beaumont.

Campbell's toured the United Kingdom in 2024 with his stand-up set Wobservations.

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

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

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

On the British panel show Would I Lie To You?, Campbell stated he was a body double for an Australian headlice comb advert called 'Nitbusters' as a child.

On the Off Menu podcast with James Acaster and Ed Gamble, Campbell stated he has been vegetarian for 3 years. He also said that he previously lived with fellow comedian Mark Silcox.