IF YOU WANT to be cool, guys, you know what to do. Talk in a slow, suave voice, move with the speed of a narcoleptic snail, and maintain that passive, slightly bored face. Not like Jamie Bowen. Avoid mentioning the following: that you live with your parents, you are afflicted with impotency at crucial times, you beat up kids. Not like Jamie Bowen. Cool Schmool. Auckland’s Jamie Bowen is entertaining, talented and hilarious.

Bowen’s Grandad has told him that even though he might grow old, he should never grow up. I think this boy listened. As far as his presentation goes, he’s like a kid on Christmas morning. His gestures and movements are lightning quick and he spits out words like a cartoon character does watermelon pips (I could still catch every line, though). He can really use his face, presenting us with a series of comedic masks; the most common being a sort of startled/intensely-interested thing. Bowen has quite small eyes, which look really funny when he raises his eyebrows almost to the ceiling, while his brow gains massive furrows like I’ve never seen. [Read more]

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He claims to be performing on Ritalin, and judging by the way he bounces off the walls it’s possible that Jamie Bowen isn’t joking.  He fills the stage with the all the energy and tension of a hyperactive toddler, at times a bit suffocating but overall whipping his audience into life and keeping them excited and engaged. But for me I Do These Things… is a bit like fairy bread – take away the sugar high and it’s really just a slice of Tip-Top white.

It’s a youthful energy, and his audience reflects that with a younger demographic than I have seen at other gigs in this festival.  They seem to lap up the gags, and going by appearances it is a very successful, hip performance.  Bowen starts with material tracing his childhood, and moves on to relationship and heartbreak stories.  Every few minutes he picks up his guitar* and belts out a power-pop number.  The songs are tightly constructed and performed, and throughout Bowen shows a focus and crispness in his delivery that is commendable.

Bowen is definitely a crowd-pleaser and he works hard for his laughs.  His high-energy antics have him sweating profusely in the spotlight but he was in control and kept his mania well harnessed.  Yet without that energy and rah-rah, to me the show is very pedestrian in content.  Bowen mugs and springs about as if covered head to toe in tiger balm, trying to get ‘out-there’, but his gags are straight down the middle of the road.  In particular, a song about ‘turning out gay’ is so blandly homophobic that to some people it may not sound like comedy at all ("You’ve got a lot of friends who wear pink" – I mean, really). 

Bowen’s childhood material is centred around Freudian basics of pooing his pants and getting stiffies, and the relationship stuff soon degenerates into angry songs about killing his ex, or at least, doing really horrible stuff to her while she slept.  Funnier, and more original, is ‘It Was The Cancer That Took You Away From Me’, a break-up song with a fabulously melodramatic streak of denial.  But for the most part, the success of the humour depends pretty heavily on the super-stimulated delivery.

Overall, Jamie Bowen presents a show that will probably please a wide audience, but that does little to raise the bar for NZ stand-up comedy.  For a young person like Bowen there is a whole world to discover beyond ‘sex, drugs and rock & roll’, and I hope that he does.

*I am serious, is every stand-up in New Zealand just a frustrated pop musician who can’t write non-ironic lyrics? 

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