By all accounts, the first Bridgetown Comedy Festival was a shaggy, hastily organized affair. Dreamed up over post-show drinks by then-local stand-up Andy Wood, fellow comic and former Portlander Matt Braunger, and comedy enthusiast and improviser Kim Brady in late 2007, the weekend-long event took over a small corner of SE Hawthorne with a lineup featuring a near-perfect combination of established talent (Patton Oswalt, Natasha Leggero, Kyle Kinane) and Portland up-and-comers (Ron Funches, Rylee Newton), all fueled by copious amounts of beer, booze, and friendly competition. The mixture was great for fans and performers alike: Comedy nerds got a solid sampler of local voices, and hometown stand-ups saw the pros in action.
Like all good success stories, things have progressed by leaps and bounds for Bridgetown since then. The annual event now spreads throughout the city, with themed showcases, podcast recordings, and smaller unofficial events. The lineup each year is consistently brilliant, with recent appearances from Peter Serafinowicz, Jessica Williams (The Daily Show), and Nathan for You star Nathan Fielder, as well as scores of emerging comics. It’s also become the model for similar events like the High Plains Comedy Festival.
With Bridgetown set to kick off its 10th installment this Thursday, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to look back at how the festival began by speaking with the folks who were there. It’s a story of credit-card debt, a lot of yelling, and the kind of comedy nerdery that’s now available to anyone with a Netflix account. And it begins with a little drunk driving.
MATT BRAUNGER, COMEDIAN AND CO-FOUNDER OF BRIDGETOWN: I got to meet all these local comics before we even started Bridgetown. When I left Chicago in 2003, I stopped off in Portland to visit. I went out drinking with my buddies and promptly got a sweet DUI. They had the option for a deferment program where you would undergo education about alcohol abuse for four months, but you had to do it in Portland. So I was basically sentenced by the court to live with my parents. In the meantime, I would just go and hit open mics at the Boiler Room and Suki’s. It was an extremely small but fun little scene with older people who had been doing it for a long time, people who were just trying it, and people like me in between. None of us could play Harvey’s and none of us cared. We were doing our own thing.
TRISTIAN SPILLMAN, COMEDIAN: There was a lot of preening and fronting, a kind of forced machismo. It was this way to represent that they were doing more to compensate for the fact that they weren’t doing very much.
VIRGINIA JONES, COMEDIAN: I started in 2006. At that time, if you took every comedian in Portland—every open mic’er, every headliner—and put them in a room, it would be 50 people. We were a dirty, proud group. One of the first people I met at that time was Andy Wood.