Tim Batt – Is Climate Change Funny Yet?
Fringe Bar, 26-32 Allen St, Te Aro, Wellington
23/05/2023 - 27/05/2023
NZ International Comedy Festival 2023
Production Details
Award-winning comedian and podcaster, Tim Batt is, like you, trying to distract himself from the big elephant in the room of being alive in 2023; climate collapse is about to absolutely rock our shit.
Too often this issue has been left out of comedy shows and there’s a good reason for that; It’s pretty bloody hard to make a human-made genocide of humans funny. But Tim is going to give it a solid go.
Hot off his Melbourne & Sydney festival runs, this will be a sensational night of sometimes-political, always organic, free range comedy.
“Witty, relatable, and an uproariously good time” – Craccum
“It’s political and personal, cultural and thoughtful. But most of all it’s funny.” – Libel
Book: https://www.comedyfestival.co.nz/find-a-show/is-climate-change-funny-yet/
Price: $25 – $28
Time: 8.45PM
Comedian – Tim Batt
Comedy , Theatre , Solo ,
60 minutes
Is it a comedy show with jokes about climate change or a climate change rant with jokes included?
Review by Emma Maguire 24th May 2023
Tim Batt’s here in Wellington this week with his newest show, Is Climate Change Funny Yet?, a rambling on fatherhood, drug experiences, and climate change. I experience it in the midst of perhaps my worst Comedy Festival audience thus far, including hecklers – which Batt fortunately deals with decently well – and several audience members sitting in front of me who won’t stop talking, texting and Googling references they don’t understand.
(Personally I would have left my perusing of the Wikipedia article for ExxonMobil until after the comedian left the stage.)
Batt brings lighter, funnier stories about being a dad now, his (and Guy Montgomery’s) podcast The Worst Idea of All Time, and getting high to see Spongebob: The Musical in New York flow into bits about Elon Musk and ExxonMobile destroying the earth. The heckler sitting directly in front of me yells out, “What about Starlink?,” to which Batt responds with, “I’ll workshop something about that for tomorrow.” – Hopefully, he won’t.
I love a show where I come out of it with more knowledge than beforehand, and on that count, this show does not disappoint, with some deeply smart wordplay and knowledge. There is some genuine political gnashing of teeth amongst the comedy in the piece, understandably around topics like Wayne Brown and the Auckland floods.
However, upsettingly enough, I really like Tim Batt as a comedian and have followed his work for nearly ten years now, but this show doesn’t hit the spot for me. While nearly all of Batt’s comedic bits draw laughs from the audience, the show especially towards the second half seems to settle into an uneasy place, unsure of itself and what it was meant to be.
Are we at a comedy show with jokes about climate change, or a climate change rant with jokes included? The show itself didn’t seem to know, which is palpable amongst the audience, and disappointing for a work that’s just come off the back of several runs in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.
It’s easy bait, and bait that Batt expressly mentions in his show, but is climate change funny yet?
Sometimes, but not necessarily in quite the way that this show wants.
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