Who Pranked the Bridgetown Comedy Festival

bridgetown comedy festival

The Bridgetown Comedy Festival, founded in 2008 by Andy Wood, Matt Braunger, and Kim Brady, just celebrated its 7th year of bringing the finest comedy in the world to Portland, Oregon. This year featured over 200 comics, including Emo Philips, Reggie Watts, W. Kamau Bell, Nathan Fielder, and Dan Harmon, who drunkenly announced the end of “Community” on the afterparty dance floor.

Bridgetown features hours and hours of great programming, outings to donut shops and 80’s arcades, but has never had competitions or awards, which can take a group of people having a good time and make them bitter competitors. The awards the performers get come in the form of free drugs and sex with local tattooed people.

However, this year a twitter account called @bridgetownfest claimed differently.

Bridgetown has always used @bridgetown to tweet show updates, promotions, gossip and important festival announcements to its 6000 followers. Six days ago, @bridgetownfest started talking up the same shows and comics, and immediately amassed 60K followers, mostly bots, which made their posts more prominent than the official twitter account. For several days, it tweeted innocuous posts, many of them copies of actual @bridgetown information. Comics started tweeting to both, unsure of which was the real account. Some followers, aware of the duplicitous account, started engaging in the alternate reality with the account. On Sunday night, @bridgetownfest started announcing Best Set and Best of The Fest comics, with awards and thanks going to Nathan Fielder and Emo Philips for their great work. It was announced that Kanye had robbed Ian Karmel of his rightful place. T-shirt prices were advertised as reducing their cost from $20 to 6 a pop. And then, the account said there was a big announcement coming.

Andy Wood Posted:

@bridgetownfest tearfully announced that this was the last Bridgetown festival, which came as a big surprise to founder and organizer Andy Wood, and thousands of other people. The twitter account thanked its followers, volunteers, comics, and audience members.

The account is now suspended, its tweets hidden, and the cover image has been revised to be about a festival in Australia.

randyPostscript:  Anonymous sources confirm that the owner of the troll account was indeed Randy Liedtke, who was behind the Pace Picante conversation with Kyle Kinane last year and who is frequently mistaken for East Side Dave, another bearded ginger.


SAUNDERS_20140116_0013-2Virginia Jones has opened for amazing people like Tommy Johnagin and Dwight Slade and has performed in venues from LA to NYC to SF to Hong Kong, but also more glamorous destinations like Indianapolis and Pocatello ID, and Billings, MT. She’s the host and producer of the new GLENDALIA comedy show in Los Angeles and appears in Portlandia and in Jordan Brady’s documentary, “I AM COMIC” and “Bridgetown: The Festival that Changed Portland Comedy.” Her mother is proud of her.

 


Go check out the GLENDALIA comedy show June 3 at the Complex in Glendale at 10:30 featuring:

Bryan Cook (Competitive Erotic Fan Fiction, Funny or Die) Susanna Lee (Last Comic Standing, SF Comedy Competition) Doug Mellard (Last Comic Standing, Moontower Festival) Jesse Case  (Parenthood, Just for Laughs Festival) Matt Kirshen (Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Fallon, LA Weekly’s Top Comics To Watch) Ali Wong  (Tonight Show, @midnight, Inside Amy Schumer)

Read more comedy news, stories, interviews with comedians, videos and comedy clips on our home page. Get more comedy news. Watch more viral videos. Read more interviews with the best comics in the business.

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Virginia Jones has opened for amazing people like Tommy Johnagin and Dwight Slade and has performed in venues from LA to NYC to SF to Hong Kong, but also more glamorous destinations like Indianapolis and Pocatello ID, and Billings, MT. She’s the host and producer of the new GLENDALIA comedy show in Los Angeles and appears in Portlandia and in Jordan Brady’s documentary, “I AM COMIC” and “Bridgetown: The Festival that Changed Portland Comedy.” Her mother is proud of her.
Virginia Jones
Virginia Jones
Virginia Jones has opened for amazing people like Tommy Johnagin and Dwight Slade and has performed in venues from LA to NYC to SF to Hong Kong, but also more glamorous destinations like Indianapolis and Pocatello ID, and Billings, MT. She’s the host and producer of the new GLENDALIA comedy show in Los Angeles and appears in Portlandia and in Jordan Brady’s documentary, “I AM COMIC” and “Bridgetown: The Festival that Changed Portland Comedy.” Her mother is proud of her.