Tarun Mohanbai’s comic persona is clearly a nerd, from his ‘Fat Albert’-style red jersey over white shirt to the way his voice squeaks when he gets excited.  This is his charm as well as his schtick, but nerdiness was not enough to win the audience over at his opening-night gig in Wellington.

Mohanbai began with an abysmal one-liner that set the bar for the rest of his set.  He then stuttered his way through a few interviews with the crowd that didn’t net any gags to speak of.  A couple of Hutt girls in the front row, as if placed there by providence, got off lightly; In more proficient hands they would have been given much rougher treated.  This nerd sounded like he was trying to flirt with them.

From there he segued neatly into his (semi)autobiographical material about horrible medical experiences… "[The nurse] said don’t worry, it’s just heat follicles."  Heat follicles?  On his balls?  AND he suffers from Colitis?  When he starts into this stuff, about problems with his arse, it reminds me more of my nerd friends from high school days than I want to remember.

There’s a blah-blah feel to Mohanbai’s delivery.  He chatters on incessantly, seemingly completely unrattled by the audience’s near-silence, the meagre responses to his thudding gags.  His material just doesn’t get there somehow.  Perhaps he doesn’t set his targets high enough, lambasting Kelly Tarlton’s Underwater World in Auckland for being too small.  As he says of theme park Rainbow’s End, "It’s alright, but it’s not that good."

He also, nerdily, confesses to watching lots and lots of television, and also evidently draws a lot of material from it.  Which is not particularly interesting.  Still, at times he does hit a shamble if not a stride.  When he talks dirty, for example, getting into grottier, x-rated material, it contrasts to great effect with his nerdy persona and suddenly flies with the crowd.  His up-to-date (to the day) comments on David Bain’s bail release also revealed a comic potential not mined to the same depth elsewhere in the set.

Mohanbai does songs* too, each one intro’ed by a ‘human beatbox’ riff, completely out of beat both with itself and the song that follows. The songs are uniformly about being Asian and are lyrically passable, the funniest of the three written from the perspective of a (young?) man behind the counter at the dairy when a beautiful woman enters.  They are funny in that they are so un-musical, in that they are sung in Mohanbai’s squeaky twitter; they are funny because they are sung by a nerd.

Nerdy humour has its place, and coupled with a razor-sharp intellect can produce material that is searingly clever as well as brutally funny – but the gags on show here in One Mic Stand feel more like the armchair observations of a nerd who needs to get out more.

*Like the majority of NZ comedians, apparently. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer