Dopamine gives us pleasure, satisfaction and motivation. It’s a precursor to adrenaline. But Sanjay Parbhu breaks it down as Dope-Amine in his self-critical standup show, putting the emphasis on ‘dope’.

“What happens when you combine an over-thinker with a dash of anxiety and a few not-so-smart decisions?” his promo material asks, inviting us to join him “as he shares how his never-ending quest to overcome stress has been nothing but, leaving you entertained with a large dose of ‘Dope-amine’.”

This is Sanjay’s second solo stand-up show, the first being in 2015, aged 23, so he can mine good material from what he’s learnt – or not – in the meantime. The clever thing about his premise is that when he’s being nervous, awkward and fumbling stuff, he’s delivering on his promise.

The first dash of anxiety comes from ‘off-stage’ – i.e. the high-table control desk in front of the Cavern Club bar – as Sanjay panics on-mic with his operator Creatif Kate about his emailed choice of intro music not coming through. Having launched himself to the mic-stand, he promises “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll”, considers trigger warnings and makes a grimace-inducing joke about a certain US screen actor.

Describing himself as smart-arse and dumb-arse – with a BA-major in Communications, he tells us later, when he can’t think of the word he wants – he rattles off stories about helping a mate play out his girlfriend’s sex fantasy, getting an unsurprising result from a DNA test, being a second-generation Kiwi Indian so knowing how to smile both ways, his love of cooking and his mother’s advice, his having “the Indian touch” with broken electronic equipment, trying to buy a hammer and overthinking it …

When a woman in the audience interjects, he accommodates it well. But when she persists somewhat unconstructively, he has the sense to ignore her, leaving her to raise her hand which he chooses not to see. Well judged by both of them.

His attempts to get his driver’s licence leads to the inevitable Palmerston North joke (is it time for a moratorium on that?). We hear about niche hobbies of the anxious, what he learned at Journalism School, what happened when he delivered on his determination to commit to the next opportunity he was offered …

Sanjay’s story about getting together with his current partner of six years (they’ve known each other for 10) includes the mishaps of their first holiday together, to a Foo Fighter concert in Auckland, what they did in Lockdown and how, when shopping, he dealt with a texted request to buy a specific item.

Sanjay is very good at using the mic for sound effects, from heartbeats through Mongolian throat singing and breathing like Darth Vader to Pac-Man. Quite a lot of his material lands very well and gets good laughs but towards the end, as he rushes to get through his set in the allotted time, anxiety stops being his friend and audience connection suffers. Less material may be more.

As he runs this new show in, rather than just tell us what happened, if Sanjay shared his experiences in ways that drew us into empathetic recognition of them, he might give us a greater dopamine hit.

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