By Peter Beaglehole
Being a comedian is a strange thing. It’s not something you want to tell someone you’ve just met. They’ll turn on you, expecting you to be gregarious and witty, or worse they’ll ask you for a joke. Generally comics are the quiet and insular types, who look forward to being another stranger at the party. Admittedly, this is because they’re subconsciously working on material. Everything they observe can be funny, a small lie turns the ordinary into the extraordinary, fallacy into truth, or the rational to the absurd. That’s what comics do; they give us permission to laugh. Comedians see the world’s strange happenings and tweak our habitual responses. They ask us, ‘Why?’
We take life seriously, we take people seriously and sometimes we shouldn’t. Comedians are the child in the cinema asking the question about the profound plot hole, the drunk Uncle telling your racist Grandpa where he can stick the soup ladle. Comedians are excessive and simple; they occupy some strange place between reality and how reality could be. Which probably explains why nobody really takes them seriously, except for certain branches of government who would rather that nobody even imagine that the way they live could change.
Still, comedians are very fragile, or more accurately egocentric, creatures who are dependent entirely on an audiences’ willingness to laugh. It’s difficult to convince a room of strangers to laugh because laughter is something we share with those closest to us. However, this difficulty is usually assisted by the presence of a bar, but it puts the comic in a place that they hadn’t imagined. Not a theatre or lecture hall, but at a bar where they might find their name scrawled above the urinal, accompanied by the words “sucks dick”. Nevertheless, there are good times, times when a slightly inebriated punter will say, ‘You were heaps funny’. This massages the ego but doesn’t last, the comic longs for the day when a punter will tell them, ‘You were heaps funny, and now I’m going to go home and switch off my lights and vote for a politician who has some rational capacities and work on my slightly homophobic tendencies.’ Every clown wants to be Hamlet, but they want a different kind of prince and different kingdom. So they give us a chance to laugh, at least for a moment, at the chaos and sadness, they let us enjoy what is inherently amusing, like our strange anatomy, but to do this they need an audience. Otherwise they spend time at home inflating their ego with self-indulgent writing like this. In summary you should come and see this show:
Rhino Room - Upstairs
Feb 21- 25 at 6pm
Feb28- Mar3 at 6pm
Preview $15
Adults $20 Concession $18
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