I’m wrestling with a dilemma here. First Jamie Bowen asks who paid for their tickets and asserts he’s indifferent to those with comps; his show is for the four who paid. Fair enough. Then – having told us about the “pretty bloody cool thing” that happened in a café – he identifies me as the one critic present (on comps, of course) and hopes that in years to come the woman who was the little girl in his story will read my review and realise “she was that girl.”

My dilemma is that if I tell the story in the requisite detail, even with a spoiler alert, I’d be committing the cardinal sin of giving the show away. So sorry, Jamie. If you want to add the story as a comment to this review, go ahead: that’s your prerogative, not mine.

Actually the premise of Bowen’s It Happened Then, Now is that whatever happens in the room gets examined, discussed, deconstructed … Of course part of what happens is that he has things to say, observations to make, with the underlying enquiry being into what it means to be human. And whenever the energy flags he tells is this is great, cool, etc.

His intro chat includes the observation that just before he starts a new show his life falls apart. He made a whole show about it (called Heart Goes Boom/ Head Goes Bang back in 2014) and wouldn’t you know, on his return from successful gigs in LA, shit has happened again. It was in the consequent joyless state that he met a mate in the Federal Deli in Auckland, suffered four loud women indulging in a ‘power lunch’, observed a mother ignoring her child while she chatted to her friend – and saw the cool thing happen which I cannot reveal.   

It’s at this point that he invites tonight’s guest – musician Rhian Sheehan – up to sit in the other chair with the other mic and sup a beer while engaging in philosophical chat, because it would seem a bit odd, he claims, to have a philosophical chat with himself.

Oddly the curious incident of the girl in the café has no bearing on what follows, other than its relevance to the overarching questions concerning life, the universe and everything. Also Bowen’s suggestion that we can all pitch in with questions and comments comes to nothing because nothing is done to encourage it.

Nevertheless their chat about such things as self-definition, religion and consciousness is quite absorbing, despite Sheehan’s claim that he is the wrong person to ask about what it means to be human because he spends his days alone in a basement composing music with electronic technology.

Bowen’s further provocations include the heat death of the universe, the Bill Gates Simulation Theory (apparently we are all supposed to know what that is), what the future will be for your kids, what great piece of current technology will soon disappear and what you would like to have uploaded to the cloud so that it will live on forever.

Sheehan’s poker-faced dryness is the perfect counterpoint to Bowen’s animated dynamic (albeit much less hyper than we’ve seen him in the past). The summing up question of “what is the meaning of life?” produces a heart-warming answer from Sheehan – and because there will be a different guest every night, I’ll summarise it: “Be a good person; don’t be an arsehole. Be creative and leave something behind that is worth listening to. Be someone your kids can be proud of.”

It Happened Then, Now offers an unusual, amiable, philosophical hour that sets it apart from standard Comedy Festival fare.

Tonight (Thursday)’s guest will be Wellington Mayor Justin Lester.

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