You might have seen Eli Matthewson on Dancing With the Stars this time last year, where he was utterly robbed of a full season due to the whim of the New Zealand voting public – I’m still sour about it (jives are terribly complicated) – and he’s back in Wellington for a zingy hour of hilarious comedy at San Fran.

Matthewson settles us in with one specific moment: when he was a kid he “let the intrusive thoughts win” and dropped a bowling ball on his mum’s foot, breaking her toe. This intrusive thought leads us into a whole bit about the audience’s intrusive thoughts, before he’s off, positively galloping between bit to bit at the speed of light.

Jokes about being a homeowner turn into a long spiel about Cabbage Patch Kids – which pops back wildly and often – to bits about his boyfriend being a psychiatrist, to Dancing With the Stars moments …Matthewson’s set is a wild ride and the audience is completely on board with it, packing out the bar and laughing along heartily the entire time. Even when the show dips into slightly bluer moments, it never does it loses its momentum, which is entirely down to Matthewson himself. He is deeply charismatic and sometimes endearingly laughs at his own jokes.

It’s a fast-paced mismatch of a show but somehow this unlikely combination works, with Matthewson wrapping together all the individual threads of the piece by the end, wherein – as penance for dropping (?) the bowling ball on his mum’s foot in 1993, he holds one over his own. Does he do it? Well, you’ll just have to come along and find out.

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer