Medium Rare are the fresh meat of NZ’s comedy talent pool, high school aged lads and lasses who, with a bit of experience under their belts, are now ‘less bloody than you think’. Not all of their material centres around being a teenager – in fact they’ve all done well to avoid most of the predictable clichés, and they’ve all got something to say.

Rose, a chatty sixteen year old, delves back into her childhood for material, because there’s nothing very funny about being a teenager when you are one. She’s confident, pretty funny, though some of her material is generation-specific, and she has a segment about her favourite childhood toys, in which she keeps asking if we "remember the [insert popular 90s toy]?" Most of us don’t …

Stephen, the second in the line up, isn’t credited in the programme and has a short but sweet set. Like the other three he has the requisite charm and enthusiasm, complemented by a pleasantly laid back style.

Jim Stanton is quite a performer, though she didn’t get any laughs out of me (just a few quiet smiles) until the bit where she comes up with a collective noun for emos and has me cackling. She’s sharp, droll and charismatic. Like her co-performers, she’s still honing her material and some of what she’s talking about makes me go ‘Um, so what?’. This isn’t entirely an issue either of subject matter or delivery, rather a bit of both – it feels like she’s doing stuff she wants to talk about rather than what she thinks would make us laugh.

Though reasonably fresh out of high school, Rhys Mathewson has a rapport with the audience that bridges the age gap. He’s the act with the most going for him. Rhys is very likeable in an amiably geeky, pudgy-guy-with-weird-hair kind of way. And I was grateful that he doesn’t keep self-consciously reminding us that he’s a ‘youth’.

Rhys’ jokes centre around making fun of his physical attributes, his inability to score girls, his tendency to get fired from jobs for extremely inappropriate behaviour, and a dance routine called ‘taphop’. His entertainment value lies in his frank, earnest style – his unabashed geekiness when talking about his exploits. He gets off scott-free with some fairly off-colour jokes simply because he comes across as such a harmless, friendly, unfashionable dude.

The amateurism of the show is compounded by intermittent raucous laughter from backstage, which I found a bit off-putting.

Yes, a bit rough around the edges, and with the gangly awkwardness of fledgling comics still practising how to fly, Medium Rare is a glimpse at what the future holds for NZ comedy, because these guys and gals all show promise. You can also catch them and others of their ilk at the Macleans Class Comedians: a two hour showcase of ‘the elite of funny from Auckland’s secondary schools’ on 10th May.

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