This isn’t your average comedy show. It’s the 30^th year showcase and a foretaste of three weeks of top flight comedy coming up in Wellington and Auckland.

The comedians onstage for the Gala night will go on to do their own shows around town. This performance fulfills two purposes. One, to confirm that their warm comedic bodies really are in town, the other to pump monies raised on the night back into the Trust. This is the vehicle that carries the mighty weight of promoting NZ comedy, in what was once a seriously comedy-strapped land but has had success after success in recent times.

Some might say that stacking yourself up against the Coronation is taking a chance. Some might say that it’s a smart move. Either way, the upmarket hall – the Michael Fower Centre – is close to full and almost nobody mentions the Coronation.

To be wearily frank, galas like these are a reviewer’s nightmare. It’s a night when nearly 20 comics strut a little bit of their stuff as a tease for their main events in later weeks. Right now I’m feeling like a teacher who has a briefcase full of school reports to do before morning and is tempted to scribble, “Very good work but still some room for improvement,” on them all.

It’s axiomatic that these ultra-smart people aren’t going to toss away their latest verbal gems at a promo event. Some even cunningly tell half a joke and mention that the punchline will be available for inspection should we wish to front up to the barrier next week.

Events like these depend heavily on an MC who can build immediate widespread rapport and set up a sound platform for others. The Gala could hardly have done better than to select Melanie Bracewell whose credentials are impeccable. She opens the first and second sections with pretty chunky and engaging sets. The Fowler Centre was built more for the reputable activities of graduation ceremonies and symphonic music. In comedy terms, it lacks the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd. Eye contract is not easy to achieve in such stolid surroundings.  It shrieks conformity rather than subversion and oddity that are the lifeblood of comedy.

So, Melanie’s stuff goes down well given the surroundings. She does not exude the manic aura of the personality-driven performer. Rather she cultivates a slightly bemused lifeform haphazardly dealing with problems that often involve men in a rather secondhand sort of way. Her theories bear listening to. My favorite is her canary in the mine theory of how to “cautiously” start a relationship with a guy. Slowly warm the pan then send in somebody else to have a look, and see if they survive. Melanie is well used to compromising and improvising with a world that was clearly not made for her. She being over 6 feet tall, a maxi skirt is needed to simulate a mini one. We can actually see the truth of that – because she proudly draws attention to it.

Melanie is massively confident and controlled. She can handle boisterous audiences with aplomb especially in a venue where the punters are at fairly safe distance. No strangulated shout from the cheap seats is ever met with anything less than a finely-elocuted and crushing riposte. This lady has mastered the lot.

In no particular order, I find myself laughing especially hard at Brynley Stent, Becky Lucas, Tom Sainsbury, Guy Montgomery, Kura Forrester, James Nokise, James Mustapic and Ray O’Leary. Happily, with Melanie added in, we have a 50-50 split of men and women. All of the performers are seasoned comics and there is nary a verbal stumble or timing miscalculation throughout the whole night. I think, though, that the ones I’ve named have a personal edge worth talking about.

The Nokise wow factor is that we see in him an urbane Polynesian whose social analysis is spot on. He presents like a neatly-coiffed philosophy professor who also happens to own half off Ponsonby. He specialises in verbally degutting the urban twerp whose only argument is that if human rights are granted to Pasifika then we will eventually be legally marrying horses. On another limb of the same sort of craziness we are left with a massive audience cheer for a line; one that imparts that if people are going to become intimately connected to cats they will hardly be waiting patiently for the legislation to be passed. A line for the ages.

Becky Umbers quite knocks me over. She has developed a marvellous persona that’s a cross between a Barbie doll with a voice like water noisily going down a drain and a low-esteem item of jailbait who can be found on the beach “near the bins”. Not so much a pedophile’s dream as a pedophile’s ‘compromise’. She fluently mocks her own unlovely voice while maintaining a fixed grin throughout. Her depictions are meticulously compiled; under some circumstances she can make noises, she reckons, that even dogs can’t hear. A lovely creation there.

Tom Sainsbury seems to be at least third cousin to Jo Lycett. His nifty little piece quoting from the comments page of the Christchurch City Council Facebook page is delivered in tones of doleful weariness from behind a folded piece of paper recording the online correspondence. (Joe, by contrast, specializes in beaming good humor and forced decency to lay verbal traps, but this is Tom we’re talking about). The Sainsbury approach is to skewer idiotic complainants and dull-witted bureaucrats by interspersing them with the deadpan comments of smartarse members of the community who follow the exchanges for fun. Works for me.

I don’t watch Shortland Street but am pretty taken by one of its former actors with comedy skills as acute as her thespian ones. Having once played Desdemona in the long running soap, Kura Forrester has made a sub-career of taking on the visual idiocies of those who recognize her in the street or inside large bottle cabinets. The bodily postures, the facial tics, the stretched voices written in tortured vowels are all lovingly reproduced. I have never seen people without lives so expertly and lovingly put to the sword. 

Ray O’Leary is a man who can draw inspiration out of dross. His ability to speak at around three kilometres a week while successfully holding our attention in a convoluted argument about human-dog telepathy, and its applicability to children, is magic – and very brave. Once you start off with that you have to go the whole nine yards. He even manages to outline how he has been nominated for the breakthrough comic award having previously won it which, in his twisted bowel world, means he’s going backwards. Not much time on stage combined with some wearily turgid words has seldom been as comically telling.

Back with the women, I can see how the routines put up by Brynley Stent could divide an audience even though it actually raises some heartfelt cheers. In a matter of five to ten minutes we witness three perceptive playlets that would take many paragraphs to describe. They have a silent movie’s visual quality but with split-second matching of actions with background sound effects. The diverse topics are the difference between how guys go to the loo in the night time as compared with a women doing the same thing. The “But how did she die?” question that never gets answered by the indifferent classmate of yore. (With an audience volunteer) the perverse duality of the human hug that can either stoke hearts or breaks backs.

You had to have been there. This is so riveting to watch and almost impossible to do. If you don’t get that, then you won’t like it at all.

Guy Montgomery launches giddily into refreshing wordplay about the complexities of selecting and wearing everyday clothes as if you were a top model. He traverses the perplexing life values of a lovely stepfather guy whose daily image is that of someone trying to “find a family to break up”. He invests letters of the alphabet with dark personalities and reveals our prejudices against dumb sullen letters like ‘k’ and ‘c’. As a would-be restaurant consultant he refines the prissy business slogan of “What it means to eat” down to: “Sell food at a profit”. Often deep and always enjoyable he carries you along with the strength of his convictions in these bizarre notions.

The Australian comedienne Becky Lucas is touchingly effective. I recall how she once set up a scenario between a woman with cancer who talked sweet nothings to her unresponsive dog (who knew her master had cancer but naturally couldn’t say that.) This time round she wisely focuses on the one deliciously set up bedroom scene from Covid days. It’s where the tiny sex toy goes walkies through the, er, back door. Her response and that of the bloke are unerringly accurate and hilarious. Again this is all very hard to do. Lucas is a master of the art of choosing her words carefully.

Finally, I pay due homage to a great piece of skilled comic acting by James Mustapic. He has the washed out appearance of Rowan Atkinson after giving three pints of blood. His quietly unhinged sermonette on being gay and a million unrelated musings is a true highlight.

In summary, the Gala is a great thing for comedy and the finances of Comedy Trust. I’ve enjoyed my night out and seen some marvellous glimmerings. But one must never forget that comedy is pervasive. It creeps into brains and takes up residence. That usually takes time. Coming in short bursts on a ‘bring ‘em on’ basis is a little unfair to the practitioners.

So please do get along to as many of the longer shows as you can. A less than stellar set at the Gala is of no real moment. Comics needs us to get to know them and in return they get to know us. They are one of the few wondrous things we have in our increasingly troubled world. Give them the best shot you can.     

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