Welcome to the online home of James W Smith. He is a comedian, a writer, and a lover of ham. He is writing this whole thing himself in the third-person and already regrets his decision to do so, but now he has opened with this bold gambit he sees it as his duty to carry it through to the end. Please bear with him.
James has been performing comedy since December 2008, during which time he has had to professionally rebrand himself with a middle initial because there is a semi-successful comedian with the same name plying his trade on the other side of the Atlantic. Since those early days he has had the pleasure of sharing a stage with the likes of Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Tony Law, Josie Long, Bridget Christie, Milton Jones, Stephen Carlin, Angelos Epithemou, Wil Hodgson, Ian Cognito, Trevor Lock, as well as plenty of other acts who are just as brilliant but don’t serve the same ability to reflect favourably on James as those already listed.
Here are some nice things that have been said about James:
“Some great one liners. Shows lots of promise.” Richard Herring
“Brilliantly frenzied… impressively insightful and consistently entertaining” – ThreeWeeks
“Very good material” – Edinburgh Evening News
“Funny, genial… better than he thinks he is” – Londonist
“Stewart Lee’s dryness, but with Dave Gorman’s delivery” – On The Fringe
James performs as regularly as possible across the country (and has, on occasion, picked up a microphone in New York City although the less said about that the better) but is based mostly in London. He maintains a gig list on this very website so if you decide you want to see him you can click on this link to find out where to go.
In 2011, he brought his debut solo hour of stand-up – James W Smith: Living In Syntax – to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It was part of the Free Fringe and ran at The Royal Mile Tavern from August 6th to August 27th (not 16th). It was a moderately pleasing show and won a grand total of no awards.
He first performed at the Fringe in 2010 alongside Daniel Smith in a show called Smith & Smith: A Matter of Life, Death, and Middle-Distance Running. As part of the wonderful Five Pound Fringe, the show ran from the 5th to the 29th August at The GRV on Guthrie Street. More detailed thoughts on the day-to-day of the Fringe experience can be found in the blogs I wrote throughout August (start from here).
He also has a daily blog that were intially referred to as Wordguffs for fairly convoluted reasons but now only remain so because it would be a real hassle to change links to each individual entry dotted all over the internet. He has been doing them for over two years and will continue to do them every day for the foreseeable future, because he obviously enjoys torturing himself with deadlines. These Wordguffs are mostly at-least-reasonably entertaining but they can sometimes verge on the interminably boring. This is the nature of writing something every day when, occasionally, nothing happens. Stick with them if you can.
All in all, this is a guy you really should pay attention to. Apparently he’s the 48th most influential British comedian on Twitter so, you know. Listen up.
