From a show for kids to one catering to a middle-aged audience keen for a laugh and an early night, Veronica Schmidt kicks off The Spinoff’s International Comedy Festival reviews.
Sounds Funny with Suzy Cato and friends
Suzy Cato walked out on stage wearing denim overalls and giant, dangly heart earrings, sang “It’s our time, kia ora, talofa” and the shitstorm that is the world right now immediately began to recede.
This was a comedy show for kids, but it was also a show for adults who are, frankly, sick of being adults. What an antidote to laugh at bum jokes, to hear “knock, knock” from the stage and watch as a theatre of excited children yelled back “who’s there?” But wait, there was more. What a revelation to discover performers so talented that you, the parent, do not have to put on laughter for your children’s sake, but instead need to cross your legs so you don’t risk accidentally weeing a bit.
Cato (who does not age) brought along Florence Hartigan as Captain Crossbone and joke-book writer Tom E. Moffatt, but it was comedian and musician Sam Smith and puppeteer Jon Coddington who really brought the house down.
Smith, who was the lead writer for 7 Days and comes up with tasks for Taskmaster NZ, should consider releasing the song ‘Your Body Can Make Any Colour But Blue’. Seriously, New Zealand has a real dearth of songs about secretions and ooze. If he wants to do a vinyl version, it would make sense to chuck ‘Jerry the Dinosaur’ (“eating all the humans was his only flaw”) on the B-side.
As for Coddington, who knew we needed to see a puppet do one-handed press-ups and imitate a duck? Let me tell you: we fucking did.
The show ended with an open mic. Absolute respect to the 4-year-old who confidently took the stage, grabbed the mic, and went “I’ve forgotten my joke”.
The only disappointment of the 90-minute show was that Auckland’s Q Theatre was only half full. Too many missed out on an afternoon of wholesome, life-affirming fun.
Now, let’s all give a giant pakpaki to Suzy and friends.
Stephen K Amos
Stephen K Amos brought the visitor-to-New Zealand jokes. He had the accent down: “New Ziland”. He’d done his due diligence: “Don’t ever fly into Wellington, for fuck’s sake.” And he was ready to gently rile us up: “Vegemite? That can fuck right off.”
If you had followed the British comedian’s long and impressive career, though, that was about where the surprises ended. The show went back over well-traversed territory: the Covid pandemic, his parents, and that comedy is subjective. Some of the lines he’d first trotted out more than a decade ago.
If the crowd had been looking for fresh or edgy, they would have been out of luck, but the audience that showed up at 5pm on a Saturday seemed happy enough. They wanted the equivalent of meat and three veg and they got it.
Amos threaded audience interaction expertly through the show – that poor bastard in the front row – built to the biggest laughs, and played to the middle-aged audience, with lines about the bygone hardship of manually winding car windows up, the proliferation of thoughtless opinion in the social media age, and the harshness of parents back in the day.
In other words, an oldie but a goodie.
