It’s not easy to review an event like this, one where they are shovelling the acts through, essentially as shortish taster sessions for the bigger and more elaborate shows to come. Here in two and a half hours onstage we see, by my count, fourteen acts under the indifferent purview of host Arj Barker from the US.

I find it convenient to ruminate on them under the following headings (a) fresh and exciting (b) thoroughly entertaining and basically original (c) confidently effective and polished (d) patently struggling and (e) putrid.

While host Barker leans into his work a little more convivially and warmly as the night wears on, he/we suffer a rusty start. There are the usual bromides about loving yet another trip to Wellington replete with the standard jetlag complaints. Sincerity is not the hallmark and I feel that any city in the world could have been substituted for the Wellington spiel (as indeed is candidly admitted at one point).

Arj seems from the outset to have failed the how-to-hold-a-microphone-and-talk course at Comics School. (Yea though the upper body move around in comic fits and starts the mic must not.) Throughout the evening, therefore, we suffer an alarming unevenness in vocal intensity that sometimes means that four different sound levels are heard in a single sentence. Arj, old son, all the other acts have the mic thingy down pat and stumbling into the sound foldback speaker is definitely not cool.

While Arj is pleasantly diverting talking about his own world Stateside, his familiarity with the comic styles of the men and women he is introducing appears close to nil. So there is little working the audience for tonight’s team as much as working them up in good old cheerleader fashion. The comedic ground ahead lies untilled.

My most favoured act of the night is The Fan Brigade. Unlike most of the others I’ve not seen this classy duo before. I am bowled over with the precision of their observation of life in rural Newzild and their dramatic singing. From moment to moment a song lying well within ordinary singing meter bobbles around from ditty to real life and back again as these two ladies retail their hilarious difficulties in scoring a drink at the Levin RSA.  I could see this all again tomorrow night and still find it wondrously fresh.

I also award extremely high marks to overseas performers Jimmie McGhie, Rhys Nicholson, Andrew Maxwell, Lloyd Langford, Marcel Lucont and Wilson Dixon. Each have that apparent effortlessness that comes from having comic timing so sharp the audience has to stand well back for fear of being lacerated.  All show they can spirit up convincing characters in a trice.

And all are invested with strong personal presence.  Jimmie McGhie is the cocky man of his pampered day who might pass as a more benign Jimmy Carr. His targets tonight are inter-generational and are spot-on accurate rather than cruelly mocking.

Rhys Nicholson comes on as if he is the exhumed body of Buddy Holly caught up in his hyperactive active spindly frame. He can pluck comedy from the very air and has a stunning talent for making common sense sound ridiculous. He works the stage incessantly and one is sorry to see him leave.

Andrew Maxwell is an Irishman happily locked in the body of an Irishman. Somewhat like Nicholson he can convulse an audience by ripping away at ludicrous concepts until all you have is the truth. Then the bastards laugh at that too. Win-win.

Lloyd Langford is Wales’s answer to Maxwell. But there is no easy retreat into a leek-toting rugger player Welsh stereotype. Of all these top acts Langford is the one most acutely ready to take his own durable material and bend it into a credible comic indictment of whatever country he is in. His assault on New Zealand TV’s woeful infomercials is a masterpiece of light sarcasm that comes across as both authentic and heartfelt. 

The audience very much enjoys the country and western-attired Wilson Dixon. Sitting ramrod straight in the Roy Orbison school of performing posture, Dixon rolls out one smashing verbal killer after the next in tones reminiscent of the Beverly Hillbillies. While Arj Barker merely bangs on about the comically overworked horrors of jet lag Dixon takes a more fruitful tack, regaling us with the clever steps he took, back home, to come to terms with the lag in advance: same topic, classier treatment. His flawless guitar rap on knowledge versus wisdom is an international screamer, too. I laugh so much I can’t remember a thing. 

Marcel Lucont seems to be a trifle more product than process but he can cunningly milk laughs with the best of them. Again, character is to the fore and the bored above-it-all Frenchie with a real glass of wine in hand is quite a good one. Its purpose is to secure height and elevation from which the rest of the world can be pissed upon. The world seems more than willing to queue for the privilege, if our audience is any gauge. (He has mastered the art of the spoof chat show host but limits himself tonight to one-off character stand-up.)

Throughout the night we have a clutch of local comedians who make up my (c) grade class, reining in their characters with ever-growing confidence.

Top of the local class is Phil Wang who challenges the seasoned imports with his assured and non-stereotypical set. This fellow is headed to the higher reaches of comedy. Half Malaysian Chinese (his mother studied archaeology and was sent by the British government over to the Orient to discover flavour). His finely honed material brilliantly exploits his unusual generic background in a most positive and effervescent way. His unhinged atheistic taunting of the deity at the end will live long in memory. I now have this guy firmly on my radar. Where have I been all his life? 

I also admire Pax Assadi’s careful Pakistani/Iranian assault on “ten percent of the NZ population” (ageing Kiwi women sums it up) and his stratagem for dodging the lame ISIS slights that unthinking idiots heap on Middle Eastern guys like him (it involves rugby). This genial lad will go far.

Michelle A’Court, Hayley Sproull and Justine Smith all have much to offer. Michelle A’Court gives us excellent if on-the-wall script ideas and bats them out with gusto and with in-yer-face female power. Hayley Sproull Sproull adopts a rather angular standing up (limiting?) profile at the piano while she get across some first rate and unusual comic ideas in song form. Justine Smith is sternly adept and vocally dominant in her ‘feminism without rose-tinted glasses’ semi-rant, some of which is redolent of South Park some many years ago. I am assured her extended show will blossom way beyond The Bachelor roses for bimbos shtick.

Similarly I find Eamonn Marra’s gentle routine addictively engaging as he reels in around thirty years of painful family cosseting over food fads that in retrospect were just plain wrong. Marra’s self-effacing coaxing of the audience is impressive and nicely measured. I need to catch him in extended mode while, hopefully, he will be looking to find a wider zeitgeist than the haunting pitfalls of gluten-free.  

Britain’s Sarah Callaghan too has some vocal strengths and truckloads of presence, but OTT Cockney delivery along with some drawn out and unconvincing comic constructs seem to me to be holding her back a tad. For me she lines up with the upper middle of the local pack.

In penultimate (d) place comes Guy Williams. Either it’s my ageing brain or the basically unmemorable nature of his comic concepts but his material simply bounces off or shoots past me and those around me. Too many of the intended shots are vocally fluffed or delivered in a harsh hectoring tone that repels rather than invites audience sympathy. Slick it is not. Clever it is not. More work needed as there could well be something there deep down.

Finally, I have to say that English comedian Andy Zaltzman is the (e) grade stink bomb of the night. He has devised an elaborately staged skit that involves literally interviewing President Trump’s brain (via small laptop and a cauliflower unimaginatively jammed onto a mike stand, no less). In this perilous endeavour Zaltzman simply throws himself at the ground – and misses.

Trump is becoming dangerous territory for comics. He is deceptively dumb and grossly oversubscribed. Here he is presented in a clumsy format emoting like a canned and chopped up Trump but in a voice format reminiscent of the late Stephen Hawking’s. Our comic gamely waffles away his baffling lines thereby sabotaging hearing and any hope of repartee. The to-and-fro between him and the cauliflower (tenuous at best) is rather less than funny.  The cauliflower wins. This one would have died at an Upper Hutt fundraiser.   

Overall, a necessarily bumpy and stop-start ride but with plenty of quality laughs and promises of better things to come over the coming weeks. That will be when these talented acts get out of this slightly artificial eight (or so) minutes of open-audition mode designed only to kick off the Festival when quality is sacrificed to width and bit of overanxious “Look at me”. 

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