Joseph Harper has a pretty serious story to tell. 

Despite growing up in Christchurch with a pacifist father and embracing the ideals of Rastafarianism and John Locke’s philosophy of Tabula Rasa, his life has led to fear and violence at most turns. 

The inciting event is a severe mugging meted out by three loud, slightly drunk Avondale locals in the middle of a busy rush hour.  This left Harper badly injured – major swelling and a nasty lasting chip out of his eye socket – and distrustful of dealing with loud noises and strangers again. 

As a seasoned comedian in the Auckland scene, I’d expect that Joseph would be fully confident but he allows himself to exude a distrust and a nervousness that, while at first seeming a bad case of opening night jitters, proves to be absolutely the right delivery for this piece and a great underpinning to his cogent storytelling. 

He paces the stage and wrings the bottom of his flannel shirt incessantly, but the nerves are a ruse to distract us from a slickly written, polished piece of craft that brings home the performer’s views, experiences and understandings. 

He’s at his funniest when he’s spouting something driven by an anger or fuelled by a determined opinion, but the audience is on his side most of the time anyway and the hour rolls along well.

The climax of our time with him is rewarding for both audience and performer as we’re asked to help him confront the fear that is driving the ideas at the core of what he’s on about.  He engages the space fully at the end and hilariously, and a bit queasily, realises a training montage payoff that he’s been building throughout. 

The back room at The Wine Cellar adds an air of shambolic spontaneity with its grungy tones and old speakers shoved in corners.  So this feels like sitting in a lounge with a mate who needs to lay a few issues on the table and confront some demons while downing a few pints and having a bit of a laugh.

Often biting and usually extremely left field in his thinking, Harper is a slick comedian who seems to be reaching his best material and eliciting laughter by simply stating the facts of his experience in the most directly shambolic, screwed-up way he knows how.

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A healthy-sized squad of fans – tertiary students and young graduates – make the short trek to the Tararua Tramping Club on Mount Vic to get their next taste of Joseph Harper’s idiosyncratic humour.  

Once more the lo-tech set up – he works under just one high side-light – his shambling manner and constant recourse to the notebook containing his script give the impression he’s unprepared. But [spoiler alert?] it is all actually carefully crafted.

As revealed in his publicity, i & i show is a direct response to Joseph’s being mugged: “This big guy jacked me in the head and broke my eye socket. My cheek swelled up like an egg was growing in my face.” It happened in Auckland’s Avondale, the assailant was Māori and has since achieved his 15 seconds of fame on telly for something else. 

The issues all this throws up for a liberal-minded white boy – and most of his audience – are at the heart of this show and give it real guts. The title – i & i – has a Rastafarian resonance and, by the way, Harper cracks out a mean Rasta accent mon.  

There are other surprises in the hour too, both vocal and physical. You wouldn’t suspect, from looking at him, that Harper once aspired to be a wrestler. His family and childhood friends and foes also slip in, as always, to the deceptively meandering narrative. And pretty well every apparently parenthetical comment turns out to support his thematic structure. 

It does have to be said his pop-culture references are rooted in his formative years as a child and adolescent which seems to limit his audience to his own age group. But for others it’s an opportunity to expand our understanding of this generation. Even so, if he ever aspired to filling larger venues for longer seasons, and graduating from the Koha deal (which pretty well justifies whatever he chooses to do), Harper may need to be aware that not everyone is familiar with his pop culture touchstones.

The driving purpose that powers his show is to overcome some specific fears and we become instrumental in helping him achieve that. I could say he needs to develop his skills in motivating audience participation but one can never be sure there is not an ulterior motive in something seeming to work less than perfectly.

While i & i is not as theatrical as Harper’s Fringe shows, it is more than stand-up. And it’s largely in retrospect that one gets how clever it is.

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