The keyboard and guitar pre-set on stage promise more than straight stand-up – and upstage there’s a smaller board: a mini keyboard or ironing board maybe? Someone sets a flask of water on it. A water board, then? Nah; no gags there – although given where he goes on a personal level …

Sri Nair opens, trying to offer a short set of his own with increasing nervousness while pursuing the main task he’s been given: telling us to “Get excited!” and “Scream!” Personally I find it a real turn-off to be treated as a mindless robot pre-programmed with function to be turned on for no good reason. We only respond out of compassion for how bad he’d feel if we stayed silent. Performers need to earn their respect and responses, I reckon.

While I’m grumbling – and this is addressed to much of the Comedy Festival fare – given the whole show is direct address, why not bring the houselights up a bit so the performers don’t have to play to a black hole and keep complaining about it? Faking eye-contact is not as effective as the real thing.

Anyway, Billy T Nominee Li’i Alaimoana makes his entrance and gently tickles his Yamaha ivories while chatting to us amiably – about the title of his show, United Airlines, bus drivers … and the fact that this is his first Comedy Festival show, having worked at a bar over the road as a bouncer. (He came to this vocation through the Raw Comedy Quest two years ago.)  

Bragging about his “comfort levels” with women provokes his first song, ‘I Don’t Need No-one Telling Me What to Do’, which in turns leads to revelations about meeting and marrying his wife, and ‘Why Are You Wearing That Dress?’ His humour arises from contrapuntal interplay between what he says and what he sings, seasoned with our own inner responses to the scenarios he describes.

It’s quite cosy, domestic material until he steps away from the keyboard to tell us about his tough upbringing in inner-suburban Wellington, courtesy of a ‘traditional’ Samoan upbringing. Anecdotes about his adolescence leave us wondering how effective the phased stages of discipline where (from the nudge to ‘the ladder’). As for what happened at the supermarket – Li’i trusts us to get the real point about his involvement in a ‘gang’ of white boys. Suffice to say this palagi feels shame, which is somehow refreshing at a comedy show.

Audience participation – getting two people up to play a simple word game – changes the mood yet again. Then, after a promising start on his guitar, Li’i bails out of his next song – ‘Holding on the You’ – because he’s got the lyrics tangled, I think. Judiciously he chooses not to try again but presses on with the next bit. And such is his winning way that he somehow turns it into a sympathy-inducing plus. Is this why he does it again with ‘I Get Hot Pretty Lady’? Doubt it.

He drifts into nostalgia about “the old McDonalds” (and he’s not talking about the farm), interrogates a couple about how they met, expands it to a room-wide call-out about (spoiler averted), tells a tale about playing rugby in Canada (totally nails that accent too) … and somehow brings it back to ‘the ladder’ (you have to be there).

Assuming Li’i has got his head around those two songs by now, his Minority Rapport can be recommended. He reports insightfully from a minority culture perspective and achieves rapport to the max. 

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