It’s the comedy critic’s ultimate nightmare: everyone around you is laughing vigorously in sporadic but explosive bursts; sincerely no less.  Ray Shipley, dressed in Hallensteins’ finest, is holding forth with what comes across as a stream of consciousness torrent of high pitched words and phrases. Ray intones admiringly about their (preferred pronoun) lesbian girlfriend Tara who is a nurse, the kind but lame response of their family to the overall situation in the daughter-marriage stakes, their acquiring of a moth-eaten city council road cone in Christchurch and its return/substitution with a new one.

They cover much day-to-day ground that the audience finds quite unstintingly hilarious – even to point of laughing so impulsively that they shriek noisily over their next five lines, then laughing equally strongly at those even though they could not possibly have heard them. Mass hysteria does seem to be at least part of the bizzo.

An anecdote about someone who thought that Ray had said they were “a medium” (mishearing “comedian”) brings the house down around me. I am witness to all this and to the pitiless fact that I could not join them as the mishearing is as far as that little drama goes. I am the doleful and wretched silent minority. I truly wish it had been otherwise.

This is not a nice dilemma to be in: not laughing your head off when all around are losing theirs. Generally, one fervently hopes that a topflight comic turn will sustain one in the coming days with oft recalled bon mots to feast on and off-the-wall comic situations to chew over and find ever richer comedic depths within. Being a party pooper at a stand-up feels downright unpleasant.

You can see that the mixed audience of kosher Wellington theatregoers is having a right royal whale of a time but for you (i.e. me) nothing is happening. Stone cold dead in the water. It’s as though the whole shooting box is encrypted and I don’t have the right de-encrypting gear. Maybe that is it.

Hopes rise a little for me when Ray rattles on enthusiastically about how they accidentally “lured” a man into the ladies and they did the business in separate but parallel stalls but then he walked out “without washing his hands”. Tears stream down many faces but again mine isn’t one of them. The spirit is willing but the execution just doesn’t do it for me.

Ray even gets stuck into the title of their own show, dissing it as an irrelevance and I am bound to agree. Maybe because I hold to the old fashioned notion that relevance is a two-way street where irrelevance is that jarring dissociation between two or more concepts. Overall, the show seems to me to lack those two or more things for any latent humour to spark off.

That said there is, of course, a statistically good chance that you will find Ray’s show the very height of couth good humour and fun. I genuinely hope you do. It goes on for just under an hour and the departing patrons seem to feel that they have invested their dosh in a rollicking good time that has been had by (nearly) all.

For my own dismal and curmudgeonly part it has the feel of a train ride to Upper Hutt where the person behind me never stops verbalising in a harsh nasal voice, broadcasting to the entire carriage the first thing that that comes into their head without, even, the excuse of talking into a mobile phone. I keep willing them, as it were, to get off at the next stop.

I freely confess to being a grumpy old bugger who idolises Jack Dee, Jon Richardson, Sean Lock and Jo Brand for their wit, limitless tonal variety, deep ironies and exquisite cleverness. Ray Shipley is therefore not for me and I doubt that I could ever enjoy their stuff. Evidently there will be many honest folk who will aver Ray is a first class hoot. I wish all of them and Ray all the very best for a thousand highly appreciated performances to come. I am unlikely to drop in. 

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