Last year’s Class Comedians showcase performers return this year with High School Comical, a bona-fide professional comedy show by crikey.  Although the atmosphere and support network available in a large scale festival is surely a great asset for fledgling comedy artists, still my hat goes off to the courage and fortitude displayed by the Ad-lol-escents.

Emcee duties are enthusiastically undertaken by Geneva Alexander-Marsters, whose genuinely playful attitude carries us through the hour with a smile and a song (about world famous Flight of the Conchords; allegedly the first she ever wrote). 

Ad-lol-escent # 1 is Anna Maclean, the slightly high strung one with a personably manic style.  She claims to be winging it since she’d prepared a whole set of blonde jokes and then dyed her hair without thinking. 

Up second is the big teddy bear one, Dan (the Man [sic]) Bakie who’s amusing enough with his tragic celebrity humour and his desire for a functional chick magnet and so on.  Following Dan, John Shen – the Asian one who kicks off with a mihi just to confuse us.  John’s chuckle-worthy material exploits as many Asian stereotypes as he can think up, including having the best shirt.

That is of course unless you’re partial to yellow pyjamas like Ad-lol-escent # 4, James Watson, the diminutive one.  It’s hard to tell if James’ nervousness is just part the ‘small nervous underdeveloped kid’ routine but in any case it fits well with his endearing insights.  Steven Boyce comes on next, the hairy one.  He’s a natural crackup, just chatting away on regular topics like being an only child and teenage libidos, like he could have gone on all night.

Sixth on the bill is the dark sultry one, Courtney Willett, whose reflections on family rivalry and wees and poos have more of a downbeat quality; not really emo, but closer to it than the others.  then it’s Aleks Bozic, the wannabe angry-young-man one who claims he listens to too much Rage Against the Machine and can’t stop saying f**k, even though I don’t recall him saying it much besides when he explained that.

Another Stephen whose surname I haven’t deduced takes the penultimate spot.  He’s the goofy one and to be honest, with the overload of so many young comics inside an hour I can’t really recall his routine except for the mental image of a horse’s cock he left us with, somehow. 

Finally closing the show is lovely Rose Matawhero, the metal-mouthed Pacifican one, of whom I spoke so highly in the Lindauer Comedy Divas review.  Rose basically repeats her set from Monday evening, and I laughed all over again.

It certainly is a lot of different personalities to take in such rapid fire.  Considering the economics of having a lineup of ten in a hundred seat theatre, it’s apparent they’re still doing it mainly for the love. 

These kids seem to enjoy the big family atmosphere but would do well now to splinter into smaller groups where they get more stage time to flesh out their individual styles. There are a number of inspired talents here who just might be on their way to becoming household comedy names of tomorrow.
  

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