If you read the press release before coming to the show, you may feel very misled. Fergus Aitken explains that the show will be “a bit of a collection of weirdness from my life,” and proceeds to present a show that has very little theme or connecting elements.

He certainly covers absurdity from his life, and much of this seems to be reliving earlier days as a younger, funnier (or funnier in his memories) performer back when he was twenty in Covent Garden, or when he was packing out the Union Hall at Vic, retellings of had-to-be-there moments in which he spontaneously responded to an unusual situation on stage in a stunningly brilliant way that had a previous audience who wasn’t us in fits.

In most of his stories, the members of the audience who laughed the most seem to have been his friends, much like tonight.

Fergus Aitken is an old school comedian for an old school audience. Not that there isn’t a place in the world for this kind of humour – of course; some of the audience laughed (possibly his friends) – but the place isn’t with me. Much of his humour is the traditional white male comedy packed with insults, dick jokes, dick comparison jokes, stories of times when he made a great witty retort to someone who had belittled him, and of course, the very liberal use of ‘fuck’ (among others) as a vocabulary enhancer.

And this is the comedy generation that has an expectation of heckling as being part of the show. Aitken almost seems to be assuming that he will get half his jokes from being able to competitively retaliate and prove himself funnier than us, the audience, in the event that we don’t like him. 

Why does a New Zealand comedian feel the need to make bestiality jokes about other New Zealanders? Do Australians not make enough of these jokes? But even Australian comedians are largely, I hope, above this. 

“Most comics do at least one of these ‘men and women are so different from each other pieces’ in their show,” he says, before proceeding to do his own, but I hadn’t seen a single comic in the Festival do one of these pieces so far, and the fact that I hadn’t actually says a lot for the situation of New Zealand comedy at the moment, which I am proud of. 

The prevalence of this kind of low-grade humour is exactly why I hated stand-up comedy for so many years and avoided it for so long. I have been lucky enough to see many shows in recent years that deviate from this enormously and are intelligent and innovative as well as hilarious and entertaining, and today it may even be possible that this type of old school comedy is on the decline. I have a strong suspicion that Aitken’s material may even have been toned down over time, and that he’s perhaps not as sexist or crude as he would like to be. 

The audience member looking close to my father’s age who comes in reeking of marijuana and confides to me, “Thought I’d better toke up before one of Fergus’ shows,” and the woman who whispers to her friend in response to the joke “…and then she yelled, ‘I’m gonna pull my piss flaps over your head!’” “What does that mean?” give me far more amusement than the comedian himself. 

It is only towards the end when he starts talking about his children that I begin to feel more sympathy towards him, but when he reveals that his now adult daughter doesn’t need money to go out on the town drinking because she is a girl, I do have to wonder how much the attitude of a parent towards gender contributes to the way their children think. 

Aitken’s last two stories are good; the rest, to me, are worthless, but as he himself says, “You just need to keep on going, even when you don’t understand what’s going on.” There is certainly an audience for this somewhere, but it isn’t me. 

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