BATS’ ‘black box’ Random stage is bare but for a standing mic and a laptop. James Mustapic’s second night audience dutifully ‘makes some noise’ to welcome him on.

Claiming middle aged women are his “target demo”, he riffs on how straight people try to make sense of gay male sex, and where he stands on “Science v Jesus” (although I’m not sure anyone claims Jesus was ‘The Creator’ because that would ignore centuries of life-on-Earth, including everything covered in the Old Testament, before he was even born).

His warm-up successfully achieved, James suddenly gets the Health Warning that establishes the premise for “venturing inside himself (Magic School Bus style) to analyse every part of his mind and body to find out why he’s just so messed up!” as his publicity puts it. Wittily presented images and video clips accompany and illustrate the rest of the how.

Mustapic’s style is gentle and slightly diffident, using what I take to be a faux timidity (he plays on being weak-kneed at one point) to offset drops of bitchy humour – which his audience loves! Clips of psychic medium Sue Nicholson opining on how to beat Covid are risible and deserve our laughter. Perhaps the Amazon Surf Store in Dunedin is worthy of ridicule too – or is it his antipathy to certain macho items of clothing? As for Curling …  

As a master of lilt, tone and timing, Mustapic has the comedian’s capacity to provoke laughter even when we’re not sure why it’s funny. A rather odd photo of Jacinda Ardern recurs in different contexts and of course she’s fair game. When he mentions “Jenner” and everyone laughs I assume he’s referring to one of the Kardashian clan – Caitlyn perhaps? – but it turns out to be his mother, Janet, ‘widowed’ to Curling, who ‘pops in’ via video a few times with helpful advice.

Making targets of old people, like his nanna, and of his father, don’t really do it for me as an objective observer, even though he’d indicated ‘absent Dad issues’ are part of “why he’s just so messed up”. Such humour leads me to ponder how easily a person with a microphone can cause a captive audience to ‘gang up’ without a second thought.

But there’s plenty of clever and amusing material to me exhumed from his “repressed memories”, from playing on the nostalgia of his demographic – e.g. with Kiwi Kids school songs – to sharing his fear of becoming “a crazy cat lady”. And despite his earlier prognosis, (spoiler alert?) he survives to perform for the rest of the week. 

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