It’s always a good sign when a comedy show starts with excellent intro music, and Kura Forrester doesn’t disappoint with MIA’s hit, ‘Paper Planes’. Held in the Heyday Dome at BATS, you can feel the anticipation in the sold-out room. Quick side note, New Zealand’s best female rapper, Coco Solid, is seated in the front row – yet another omen of good things to come.

I didn’t know anything about Kura before coming into her highly anticipated new show Kura Shoulda Woulda and I’m glad I come in with such ignorance because, to be honest, she blows me away. My abs hurts from laughing so much and I do yoga on the reg.

Her show is a mix of quirky tales of love, loss, whānau dynamics, pizza and, most hilariously, Sonny Bill Williams. During the show she goes between being herself, the indomitable Kura, the self-proclaimed ‘fuck-up’ of her family, to taking on roles as her Uncle Guzzie, her future dog, her mum’s annoying best friend Rosalind, and Kayla, a government worker. Some of the characters are less loveable than others, but she plays them all so well (my fave is the dog who is very anxious about Kura’s future. He shouldn’t be – she’s gonna be just fine).

Through playing these characters in each of her stories, Kura thoughtfully unpacks her regrets while she shares her rather contagious zest for life. One of this year’s Billy T nominees, it’s not hard to see why she scored such a win: she had sell-out seasons of her solo comedy show, Tiki Tour, and I can see her repeating this with Kura Shoulda Woulda.

Sitting there listening to her detail her life as the family’s black sheep, you can’t help but fall in love with her a little. We’re all fuck ups in our way, and Kura makes it all a little bit more acceptable to be THAT member of the family. While she roasts her mum about being too apologetic, and her sister Bubbles about being a hardcore nos* addict, she manages to do it in a loving way.

The roasts don’t end with her family – her exes get some good stage time (shout out to Nipple Tape Guy and Caravan Guy in Papakura), as do race relations and the importance of Te Reo Māori in New Zealand, but ultimately, Kura’s show is about her insides (both figuratively and literally, but I won’t spoil that here) and her outsides, all with the underlying theme that if you’re one of those people that feels like you don’t belong in the world, it’s because you’re here to change it.

I love me a bit of comedy that manages to send the audience off with nuggets of insight and beauty as well as sore abs. If you’re into that, go.

*Nitrous Oxide 

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