The Spinoff heads to the comedy festival.
Henry Yan
Wellington’s Cavern Club is a bit of a dank hole-in-the-wall, but it’s a cosy place to catch some comedy. It’s probably a smaller venue than what the Auckland-born but now Melbourne-based Henry Yan is used to these days, but the intimacy of it all only heightens his comedic character’s clumsy social skills. During a set focused on the highs and lows of life as a perpetually single 30-year-old, you really start to feel like you’re on one of those bad first dates you’ll never stop telling your friends about.
I say this all in the most complimentary way possible. I loved Yan’s show, not just for the affordable pints and free Best Mayo sachets (courtesy of the comedy festival’s sponsor), but for the fact that I smiled and laughed so hard that my face almost hurt.
The strength of Yan’s comedy is in his awkwardness, the way he says “haha, crazy…” after every other line (got me every time), the way he takes a joke bombing and turns it into another opportunity to make another joke, appealing to the audience’s pity.
Yan’s audience work was also impactful; he seemed to make a genuine connection with a fellow spreadsheet-obsessive in the crowd. Unfortunately, he wasn’t so lucky with the one single woman at the show. But there’s more comedic value in quiet rejection than the alternative.
Yan’s show wraps with the story of the first (and only) time he told a woman “I love you”. In classic Millennial fashion, he does it over text and it ends in him being blocked. It’s depressing and darkly tongue-in-cheek, but a dating experience all digital natives are familiar with.
Yan dips in and out of this central theme of the show throughout, but manages to come back and tie it up with a nice bow.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a lot more of this Billy T Award nominee appear on our screens soon. Put him on Taskmaster, immediately. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
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. / Veronica Schmidt
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. /Veronica Schmidt
The Christchurch Comedy Gala
At the start of the month, Christchurch showed up in force at the town hall for the first comedy gala to make it down south since 2017. Hosted by an astoundingly spry Dai Henwood, who revealed he had just undergone a round of chemo the week prior, the evening was a smorgasbord of over a dozen acts and just as many delectable compliments for the Garden City. “I can feel the smugness coming off you,” Henwood told the crowd.
Along with Christchurch’s glow-up, there were a few other topics that were trending over the course of the night. More than one comedian had Gandalf’s infamous utterance “you shall not pass” as a punchline – is Middle Earth back, or did it never leave? Other popular subjects included bisexuality, autism and David Seymour. A couple of the men talked a bit about World War 3, and just as many women talked a bit about their sagging boobs.
Last year’s Billy T winner Hoani Hotene was a local highlight, his laid back cadence a welcome gear shift to the general freneticism of the evening as he talked about his time in kura kaupapa among kids from all walks of life (including very talented bulldog sketch artists). Angella Dravid also brought the house down early on with her wide-eyed, deadpan delivery of some of the most shocking and surprising combination of words you’ve ever heard in your life.
As for the international acts, Venezuelan comedian Ivan Aristeguieta brought a plethora of clever observations about how twisted the English language actually is. Australia’s Felicity Ward leaned on the speaker like a good friend at the pub while opening up about dating after divorce. Also from across the ditch was Elouise Eftos, whose sublimely confident set tackled everything from street harassment to sexy Italians (and roasted a local plumber for good measure).
There were some moments that didn’t quite land. The crowd energy was waning by the time Christchurch’s Court Jesters took the stage to improvise a song as the final act of the night, and I wonder if they would have got bigger laughs earlier on in the setlist. I also have to shout out the punters in the front row who kept popping out of their seats to fetch more pottles of free mayonnaise. It’s been nine years since Christchurch had the chance, and here’s hoping we get it again. / Alex Casey
