Brendon Burns
A booming, sweat-soaked instigator who weaponizes the audience's discomfort.
1 special · 2016
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Brendon Burns performs like a man trying to start a brawl in a pub parking lot. He paces the stage with heavy steps, locking onto audience members with a bug-eyed stare. He shouts. He sweats through his shirt. If a premise makes the room tense up, he doesn’t back off or try to ease the tension with a gentle aside. He leans directly into the silence, mocking the crowd for freezing up, pushing the discomfort until it finally breaks into a laugh.
Specials
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A grungy, black-and-white comedy set filmed under scaffolding in Manchester.
YouTube · 54 min
On stage
He occupies a strange, specific tier in the UK comedy ecosystem. He took the top prize at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007, the kind of hardware that usually mints a television star. Instead, he remained a club comic and a favorite among other standups. He leans into this career reality on stage, happily pointing out the absurdity of performing heavily structured, theatrical hours to fifty people in a basement.
His best material operates as a trap. He uses a crude, aggressively Australian persona to disguise careful arguments about bigotry and social norms. He will deliver a terrible premise just to measure the temperature of the gasp it produces, then spend ten minutes dissecting exactly why the front row stiffened. He shouts to batter down the polite defenses of a middle-class crowd so he can get to the actual point.
In his forties, he found out he had been partially deaf since childhood. He immediately folded the diagnosis into his act, offering it as a belated medical explanation for why he had spent two decades screaming at strangers.
Turning points
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Won the 2007 Edinburgh Comedy Award
Burns won the prestigious if.comedy award for best live comedy show at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival Fringe with So I Suppose This Is Offensive Now.
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Walkout From ITV Reality Show
After being hired as a presenter on ITV's I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! NOW!, Burns walked off the production after appearing in only three shows.
At a glance
Podcasts
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Dumb White Guy · host
Originally launched as The Brendon Burns Show, this podcast discussed the UK comedy scene, featured live gig audio, and evolved into a travelogue interview series with fellow comedians.
Also on screen
- The 11 O'Clock Show
- 2001–2003
- A Whole 'Nother Story
- Hut 33
- Fighting with My Family
A clip to start with
A clip of Brendon Burns