Pooftas, dicks and bog women filled our nights in week one of the biggest comedy event of the year.
Viki Moananu – Poofta
Viki Moananu reckons it should come as no surprise that the word “poofta” – “harder than queer, but softer than f*****” – originated in the worst place in the world: Australia. But rather than let the label, first gifted to him by his older sister, get him down, the comedian sees the silver lining in it all: being able to disrupt the alt-right pipeline and spread the gay agenda.
In a nearly full-hour comedy set, Moananu muses on being a Samoan atheist who is also a younger brother to five sisters, the up and down career of Roseanne Barr, and that time Destiny Church tried to recruit him until they realised he was gay. In other moments, he’s bathed in green and pink lights and singing ‘No One Mourns the Wicked’ (but replacing the w-word with “poofta”) alongside a two-woman band, or considered a philosophical statement posed by Yoko Ono: “You see a chair as it is. But when you burn the chair, you suddenly realise that the chair in your head did not burn or disappear.”
He ruthlessly ribbed the audience. He almost fooled us into following along with him in saying “brown people are inherently violent”. He clocked a fellow gay in the front row within two minutes of her sitting down. He had me walking back home after a particularly “meh” day thinking everything wasn’t so bad and serious, after all. / Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
Alayne Dick – Purple is the Gayest Colour
Yes, there is a solid five minutes of material on the fact that Alayne Dick’s last name is Dick. Including the important reminder that journalists use last names to refer to people so this review would potentially include lines such as “Dick always disappoints” or “Dick was not worth the price of admission”. But despite being largely unfamiliar with both versions of the word, I found Dick to be a curious delight. On opening night, she was performing to a small but warm room upstairs at The Basement, and felt in control of it. Musing on her life growing up gay in Blenheim, having ADHD and working as a librarian, the show was an easy watch, if not one to leave you clutching your side.
Dick was at her best when she was responding organically to moments – whether riffing on a surprise laugh from the crowd or her own stumble in a joke delivery. In those moments she felt like a pro trying out new material. At other times, follow-up jokes delivered too fast felt like foregone conclusions, where the journey was better than the destination. But overall, as someone who gets extremely stressed when watching comedians perform live, I felt safe in Dick’s hands. / Madeleine Chapman
Sean Hill – Did you know I’m a DJ?!
Sean Hill is a funny guy. You can tell he’s got some jokes, and also some pretty solid comic timing (which I assume you can hear on his regular gig as a host-slash-DJ on The Edge). Sean Hill is also charming! He can ingratiate himself to a crowd, even one as warmly quiet as his opening night crowd was, and also manage that tricky balance of confidence and self-deprecation. It’s a blend that, in general, I find bewildering as stand-up comedy is very much an “opt-in” kind of a gig.
Unfortunately, Sean Hill doesn’t have an hour of stand-up yet. His material varies from street jokes – we do know the conundrum of Mickey Mouse having one dog as a friend and another as a pet, yes – to observations that go right past being relatable and straight to being pretty damn obvious. It makes up around 60 minutes, sure, but it’s absolutely the sum of its parts rather than a structured hour. His best bits are his material about being a DJ, and the weird situations that gig puts him in. When he’s in the flow of a story, he has the audience securely on the hook, and he’s flying. Given how prolific he is in his other work, there’s definitely an hour of comedy in that, ready to be mined. / Sam Brooks
Johanna Cosgrove – Sweetie
Johanna Cosgrove is at her best when paying tribute to her first lesbian love, the bog woman: perfectly preserved for thousands of years, no one knows who she was, no one knows where she came from. Cosgrove meets the bog woman at the end of a breakup that took her to the other side of the world, and comes to a sobering realisation – that this 1,000+ year-old corpse is actually really fucking disgusting, and her twink friend’s psychic might be right in projecting that Cosgrove is carrying “kilograms” of burdens from being dumped every year of her adult life.
My preferred comedy style is when someone who has gone through something horrific (ideally a really terrible breakup rather than something truly life or death) is able to exploit their pain for my own laughter and personal learning experience, so kudos to Cosgrove for having me giggling, gagging and going “mmmhhhhmmm” with every love-related truth bomb dropped. She never lost her energy or flow, and she also looked really fucking fabulous doing it. Sure, there was one weird them/they gag, but I’ll forgive that for the rest of Cosgrove’s 57 minutes on stage being an absolute hoot. / LWS
Florence Hartigan – Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato
Nostalgia never dies. When the present day lacks material, you dig around in the past. In this solo show, more theatre than stand-up, Florence Hartigan flings us back into the Y2K era – the era of flip phones, ‘Kiss Me’ and Suzy Cato herself. She plays Rachel, a 17-year-old who would rather be dealing with the woes of first love than the weirdness of her doomsday prepper dad, as well as a handful of other characters that populate a life that feels much higher stakes from the inside than from the outside. So, you know, like most teenage lives.
Hartigan’s an immensely watchable and likeable performer, and she gives Me, My Mother and Suzy Cato an urgency that it otherwise lacks; the material is often so gentle and lovely that it feels lightweight, but Hartigan keeps it from floating away. It’s definitely a show that is lighter on laughs than you would expect from a Comedy Festival show, but what it lacks in punchlines, it makes up for in charm. Memory lane is a popular destination for a reason. / SB
Tim Provise – The Kapahaka Dropout
Safe to say that when Tim Provise walked out onto the stage with a can of Woodys in hand, I knew we were going to be in for a show. The show’s “Kapa Haka Dropout” twist on Kanye West’s The College Dropout album was enough to indicate to me that I was the target demographic for this one. There were a couple of prefaces from Tim Provise – the first being that it was his third time doing stand-up in such a setting and the second was a Matrix-like choice between the blue pill or the red pill. If you chose the blue pill, you could “fuck off”. Red pill it was.
Tim Provise said his show would be like drinking in the garage with him, and it certainly felt that way. The proud South Aucklander has now moved to Taranaki, but his show is rooted in Manurewa – where he draws on his experiences as a white-passing Māori growing up in the hood.
This show is not for the easily offended, covering everything from addiction, race relations and sexuality through to disabilities. That being said, its self-deprecating “red pill humour” certainly appealed to me. There were moments that felt all too relatable and I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. With shades of Dave Chapelle and Bernie Mac, Tim Provise is a diamond in the rough who can only get better as he continues to perfect his craft. Certain lines and jokes could benefit from some refinement in their delivery, while other parts probably hit better than Tim Provise was expecting.
While he did walk relatively close to the overly-offensive edge, I feel as though Tim Provise held punches where he could have unleashed. That is the diamond I believe needs to be uncovered. All-in-all, it was a funny show that I would recommend. I would happily pay to see him again. / Liam Rātana
