Geddis Is Good For You

One of Northern Ireland’s foremost up-and-coming comedic talents, Colin Geddis first gained a cult following for a series of videos he posted on YouTube during his student days, which offered evidence of his considerable skill in the area of character-based humour.

Indeed, the first short he posted, I Am Fighter, concerning mixed martial arts enthusiast Barry “The Blender” Henderson – a layabout who has deluded himself into thinking he is “a lethal killing machine” – has to date accumulated over 700,000 hits on YouTube.
Geddis, who took up a successful career in stand-up on the back of the acclaim afforded his comedy videos, is at a loss to explain the clip’s popularity.
“We literally just made it because we were bored and had a punchbag,” he recalls. “There was no hope behind it particularly. At the time I had a younger sister – I still do – and I think she must have shown it to people at school, and then they showed it to their friends. It just built and built, and then they would show their parents and so on. All of a sudden, people were shouting at you in the street.
“I don’t even know what it is about that video that people like. People shout stuff at me in the street and I’m not even sure what video it’s from. I made it, put it online and then just left it. People are just shouting this shit, and I have no idea.”
On the stand-up front, Geddis has just performed at a launch for a new multi-stranded comedy campaign by Magners, and is kept busy with regular gigs around Belfast.
“We have a monthly show in Lavery’s Bar, which would be some of the better acts from here,” he explains. “There are also Empire gigs, which would be the main gig in Belfast, and the Queen’s thing is just when the students are there during term time. They’d be the sort of gigs that I would do up here.”
Colin is also performing at this year’s Glasgowbury Festival, an event for which he has a lot of enthusiasm.
“The vibe at it is pretty good,” he notes. “Last year was the first comedy tent they’d ever done, and it was brilliant. The music was a bit close behind the stage, but the tent was filled all day. It ended a bit early because the headline band were coming on, and people were sort of standing there like, ‘Aw, is that it?’ I think there were people who would have just sat there all day and watched comedy rather than music. It’s a good wee festival.”
Does Colin feel that Northern Ireland generally is a good place to start out in comedy?
“Probably, because the comedy scene is so terrible,” he quips. “Don’t get me wrong, some of the shows are lovely, but you do so many shit gigs. Basically what happens is that there aren’t enough comedy clubs or big nights. So people set up their own nights. Most of them are terrible. Some of them are very good – there’s one in Omagh called Daly’s, and they’re brilliant. They really know how to run a club.
“There’s a lot of them where people ask you, ‘Do you wanna do a gig?’, and you turn up, and they just don’t know how to set up comedy. And people up here don’t know how to watch comedy properly. They go and get stupid drunk, and then turn up and talk, and you’re like, ‘Why did you pay a tenner in to just sit and talk?!’ That style of comedy up here means you’re trawling through shit for that long, that by the time you get to a really nice gig – especially if you go away, like to Glasgow or something – it’s brilliant.
“Up until then, you’ve been overly aggressive, trying to scream over loud crowds and putting down hecklers. There are a lot of comedians whose style is so aggressive that by the time they get to a nice gig, they just trash it, because they’ve been dodging bullets for so long. Mickey Bartlett, who’s just played with Patrick Kielty at the Odyssey, would perhaps be a bit like that, and Ruairi Ward, and me too, probably.”
After previous unhappy experiences with writing and performing for television, Geddis and his collaborators have now decided to make a pilot themselves, with a view to perhaps selling it to the UK.
“It’s a mock-documentary, with eight or ten characters played by me and other comedians,” he elaborates. “It’s exactly what we’ve wanted to do from the word go. Whether it goes anywhere or not, I don’t really care, because we’re doing it for ourselves anyway, so it should be good. There was a thing up here on BBC NI called The Estate, which was a documentary about a shithole estate in Northern Ireland, and it just cuts between different people and different families, and what their stories are. That’s exactly what we were going to do – all these strange characters living in one area, and each character would have their own story.
“It’s been through the mill a few times. Obviously there was I Am Fighter, and we were going to do six standalone episodes along those lines, but then we thought about it a bit more, and now it’s going to be the mock-documentary. The working title at the minute is Cross Section, because it’s a cross section of the community basically, but we’re not entirely sure what it’s going to be like yet.”
It would seem that making your own material is beneficial when it comes to getting started in comedy, although Geddis remains resolute that he hasn’t hit on a secret formula.
“It is a good thing to have, but then it’s so hit and miss,” he considers. “I have no idea why anyone watches my videos over anything else. I don’t know the secret to getting people to watch your video. There has to be something about it that people seem to like – I’m not really sure what the science is behind it.”

Colin Geddis plays Glasgowbury on July 21.