KBOO is a proud sponsor of the Bridgetown Comedy Festival
Voted Best Comedy Festival by Punchline Magazine, Bridgetown is the premier event showcasing comedy's biggest names and rising stars.
| When: | April 12-15, 2011 |
|---|---|
| Where: | Bagdad Theater, Helium Comedy Club, Hollywood Theatre, Hawthorne Theatre, Bossanova Ballroom, Mt. Tabor Theater, Bar of the Gods, Tanker, and the East Portland Eagles Lodge |
| Tickets: | Purchase tickets here |
2012 is looking to be the best year yet for the Bridgetown Comedy Festival, with tons of new talent alongside audience favorites! Headliners include Todd Barry, Jon Glaser, and Janeane Garofalo. There are over 240 performers in all!
KBOO gave away a pair of tickets, and Jessica van Waardenburg is the winner. Congrats, Jessica!
Showcases include geographic areas like Boston, Canada, Chicago, the Northwest, the South, Austin, Portland (hey, that's us!) and San Francisco. Or live recordings of podcasts like Kevin Allison's Risk! and Comedy Film Nerds. Or stars of podcasts like Who Charted? and Improv4Humans. Or Doug Benson's Con Air Movie Interruptions. Or Adult Swim shows The Delocated Witness Protection Program Variety Show and Eagleheart: A Town Forum. Or the Portland film premiere of Freak Dance. Or web series like Jason Nash is Married. And much much more.
The Bridgetown Comedy Festival is centered in Southeast Portland’s Hawthorne district, home to a plethora of bars, theaters and music venues. It was a perfect location in its eclectic mix of traditional theaters and unconventional performance spaces. The variety of stages and the walkability of the neighborhood gave Bridgetown a true festival feel – audience members could see any of the dozens of shows over the course of the weekend with a single wristband, and they could quickly hop from seeing a sold-out peformance in a 500-seat venue to seeing a Tonight Show performer in a ridiculously intimate, 20-seat performance space on a bar’s back patio.
Check out this interview with Andy Wood, comedian & Bridgetown Comedy Festival organizer. KBOO's Deena Bee asks the hard questions.
The Bridgetown Comedy Festival arose from a love of boundary-pushing comedy shared by a fan, a budding comedian and an emerging talent who met one night at a Portland comedy show. In October of 2007, after a performance at Portland’s Towne Lounge, comedians Matt Braunger and Andy Wood were joined for a drink by comedy fan Kim Brady. Over the course of the conversation, the three realized how similar their taste in comedy was. They agreed that while the national & Pacific Northwest's standup scenes were in the midst of a golden age, Portland’s exposure to it was somewhat limited.
When Kim suggested the idea of producing a festival in Portland, they all thought that an event of that kind was long overdue. As the three began to make a wishlist of names, they found that Matt knew many of their favorite comics from his time in Chicago and Los Angeles, and that a large number of them had expressed an interest in coming to Portland to perform. As the lineup for the first year of the festival began to coalesce, eventual 2008 headliner Patton Oswalt learned about the plans for Bridgetown. He liked the idea of a Portland festival so much that he contacted the founders about helping get the fledgling event off the ground, and his performance at Bridgetown helped ensure that year one of the festival would be a success.