Will Hodgson - Chippenham On My Shoulder

Will Hodgson is a squat, heavily tattooed man. If it weren’t for the hair—close cropped and pink—and his sort of meek schoolboy gaze, he would resemble a miner. The knee-jerk reaction to his opening few gags is one of sneering annoyance, his droning voice essentially spelling out the dramas of a little emo girl. Yet the initial reaction to Hodgson is not to be trusted. His monotone and his intense vulnerability become likeable: they are the traits of a rather fascinating comic.

This year’s show, Chippenham On My Shoulder, deals primarily with masculinity. It is an auto-biographical study of a life spent around men - his father, his father’s friends - as an outsider in their world of tool making, sports and misogyny. What is consistently interesting about Hodgson’s anecdotes is his reaction to a culture which he sees as both cruel and attractive. When he discusses the hardest man in Chippenham, his father’s mate Nobby Webb, he manages to combine a very real form of social critique with endearing familial nostalgia.

This dual vantage provides Hodgson with a wealth of imagery drawn from a mix of pop-culture and the English working class tradition, so a simile like "fists the size of Judy Finnegan’s breasts" is almost as celebratory as it is mocking. In spite of his brash appearance, Hodgson’s comedy has an underlying subtlety and an original, refined way of seeing the world.