Blast from the Past
So I've been browsing through the wonder that is The Internet Archive, plus the less wonderful dusty depths of my old hard drive, and I've found some of that old writing I was burbling about. I'll chuck some of them up here now.
First up a review I did back in 2000 of a Mike King comedy show.
So I scored some freebie tickets to go & see "Mike King and his laughing monkey boy, Radar" up at the Powerstation the other week. The show was part of the Laugh Festival thing, I was hoping for tickets to the Tokyo Shock Boys, but being an avid Pulp Comedy viewer I figured if I was going to not pay for tickets to a show, I might as well not pay for a New Zealand show, I'm the patriotic type. Thanks to UFM for the giveaway, who says its hard to win stuff off the radio!
It was my first time at the Powerstation, I can see that it would be a pretty good small-medium gig venue. It was a pretty good big comedy gig venue too, except the seats sucked. Not (just) the seats we were in, but the seats in general, they were those yellow plastic, metal-framed, bolted too close together, no legroom, cheap-arse seats. Ideal for primary school assemblies, but not great for grownup butts.
Anyway, Radar started the show off, after a quick intro, and a bit of heckler bashing - he's good at it, but what sort of heckler has a washing machine fetish! - he entertained us with an account of his mind-altered trip vertically across Australia on his way to East Timor. That's right, I said mind-altered, not mind-altering. His mind was altered long before he made it across the Tasman!
Radar is a funny guy, and either he made the whole set up as he went along, or he did a damned good job of acting as if he did. This is a good thing, the set was original and funny, and I don't think the heckler will get some of those images out of his mind for a long time.
As well as being funny by himself, Radar gets an automatic laugh just for being teamed with Mike King. Their styles are almost completely opposite on the comedy spectrum. Radar has the rambling, talespinning style of an Eddie Izzard or a Billy Connelly with his own drug-addled Varsity-boy twist. Mike comes more from the Billy T James end of the spectrum (if you took Billy T & cut him in half you'd have Mike King & Pio Terei: Mike got the wicked sense of NZ culture and Pio got the G rating.), a classic stand-up comedian with a wide repertoire of one-liners and stories. Being as I said an avid Pulp Comedy viewer, Mike King was a little bit of a let-down. He was funny, he was clever, he used a lot of material he had already used on TV. Oh well. He was still worth seeing. After the intermission Mike & Radar came up and performed a big chunk of what I gather was the show they toured last year, only a few bits of which had made it to TV. The second half started well, with some good, funny takes on the history of New Zealand. But it dragged a bit towards the end and the actual end of the show fell kind of flat. I was expecting some sort of big finish, but it just tapered off with a quick song from Mike to send us on our way.
Overall I definitely got my money's worth, considering I only paid the price of a car trip to Auckland (before petrol prices shot up!). I don't think I would have been quite as amused if I had paid the $20 asking price for a ticket as well. If I hadn't seen Mike on the telly the show would have been worth it for sure, although I still reckon they could have tightened up the back end a bit.
First up a review I did back in 2000 of a Mike King comedy show.
So I scored some freebie tickets to go & see "Mike King and his laughing monkey boy, Radar" up at the Powerstation the other week. The show was part of the Laugh Festival thing, I was hoping for tickets to the Tokyo Shock Boys, but being an avid Pulp Comedy viewer I figured if I was going to not pay for tickets to a show, I might as well not pay for a New Zealand show, I'm the patriotic type. Thanks to UFM for the giveaway, who says its hard to win stuff off the radio!
It was my first time at the Powerstation, I can see that it would be a pretty good small-medium gig venue. It was a pretty good big comedy gig venue too, except the seats sucked. Not (just) the seats we were in, but the seats in general, they were those yellow plastic, metal-framed, bolted too close together, no legroom, cheap-arse seats. Ideal for primary school assemblies, but not great for grownup butts.
Anyway, Radar started the show off, after a quick intro, and a bit of heckler bashing - he's good at it, but what sort of heckler has a washing machine fetish! - he entertained us with an account of his mind-altered trip vertically across Australia on his way to East Timor. That's right, I said mind-altered, not mind-altering. His mind was altered long before he made it across the Tasman!
Radar is a funny guy, and either he made the whole set up as he went along, or he did a damned good job of acting as if he did. This is a good thing, the set was original and funny, and I don't think the heckler will get some of those images out of his mind for a long time.
As well as being funny by himself, Radar gets an automatic laugh just for being teamed with Mike King. Their styles are almost completely opposite on the comedy spectrum. Radar has the rambling, talespinning style of an Eddie Izzard or a Billy Connelly with his own drug-addled Varsity-boy twist. Mike comes more from the Billy T James end of the spectrum (if you took Billy T & cut him in half you'd have Mike King & Pio Terei: Mike got the wicked sense of NZ culture and Pio got the G rating.), a classic stand-up comedian with a wide repertoire of one-liners and stories. Being as I said an avid Pulp Comedy viewer, Mike King was a little bit of a let-down. He was funny, he was clever, he used a lot of material he had already used on TV. Oh well. He was still worth seeing. After the intermission Mike & Radar came up and performed a big chunk of what I gather was the show they toured last year, only a few bits of which had made it to TV. The second half started well, with some good, funny takes on the history of New Zealand. But it dragged a bit towards the end and the actual end of the show fell kind of flat. I was expecting some sort of big finish, but it just tapered off with a quick song from Mike to send us on our way.
Overall I definitely got my money's worth, considering I only paid the price of a car trip to Auckland (before petrol prices shot up!). I don't think I would have been quite as amused if I had paid the $20 asking price for a ticket as well. If I hadn't seen Mike on the telly the show would have been worth it for sure, although I still reckon they could have tightened up the back end a bit.
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