San Francisco Bathhouse
May 11-12 (Wgtn) | Reviewed by Ewan Kingston

STANDING in a line; Lovegrove in T-shirt and black undies, Messrs Gonzales-Macuer, Wrigley and Henwood starkers but for the cylindrical advertising hoardings they clutched.

Late Laughs has shifted venues. Last year it was at Downstage. This year there was a large queue outside the San Fransisco Bathhouse for the sold-out Late Laughs: Week 1, 2007. They were expecting the raunchy and the raw. They were not disappointed.

Brendan Lovegrove, the MC, was his usual hyperactive, caustic, hilarious self. Known for showing audience members no mercy, this night was no exception. A Stacey was lambasted for being young and feisty, a Richard for being old and slow. Oh, and anyone from Lower Hutt was really dissed. Our MC immediately set the tone in the storm-water drains that run below the gutter. After his first few minutes he reflected, “we’ve done amputee jokes, rape jokes... any dwarves in the house?” (I'm told that perhaps unbeknown to him, a smaller person waspresent. Apparently Lovegrove was chastised at the intermission.) Some of his material I'd heard before, but was generally robust enough to survive a second showing. Most of us loved Lovegrove: he had us laughing hard, despite our best intentions.

Coming on next, Jerome Chandrahasen, couldn’t match his intensity. Forgivable. But something was definitely missing – a sense of direction perhaps. With feet seemingly encased in Bypass quality concrete, his only movement was the ubiquitous Indian “head waggle”¹. Not that a static comic is necessarily a bad comic, but Chandrahasen seemed to be symbolically stuck in no-man’s land. He had good jokes but his humour was not dry enough to work deadpan, and not flamboyant enough to be absurd.

Contrast that with Dai Henwood (I’m departing from chronological order here, for the pedants among us). Coming on as the last scheduled act, Henwood, an expat Wellingtonian switched effortlessly between a sort of Fred Dagg for the noughties and a rubber limbed, dynamic, bonkers performance artist. His material – the eighties, the shelteredness of New Zealand – was kinda safe, but it was the juxtaposition of deadpan and ridiculous, of conceptual and physical that really made his set. His interpretive dance to “When Doves Cry”, performed as a pick-up technique in a McDonalds queue, was totally masterful.

Less successful was Steve Wrigley , who came on second. Although he rocked last year’s Late Laughs, at times tonight he was quite flat. Maybe he, like Chandrahasen was daunted by Lovegrove’s intensity. Perhaps someone had spiked his beer with valium before the performance. Hopefully he’s saving his good material for his upcoming gigs. Like Lovegrove, a lot of his material was audience-baiting, but unlike Lovegrove, his ad-libs petered out. It wasn’t a total failure, though. Wrigley has a refreshing comic persona and a genuine surreal aspect to his material (who else makes jokes about the Norse God Loki and his ‘dirty hips of justice’?) He played the midget card too, and perhaps won a trick, and his final sight gag, later in the night definitely redeemed him. But I’ll get to that.

Cori Gonzalez-Macuer was impressive. As the host of Welly’s regular comedy night, it was perhaps not surprising he felt at home in front of the crowd. With us seated (or standing) nicely virtually in his living room, he played us his songs about stalkers and lost loves, mused on his mixed heritage, and told all the couples in the audience their relationships would fail. We laughed. This young man gave the impression that he loves comedy. It rubbed off on us.

Between acts we saw our tireless MC garner a round of applause for the long suffering Richard. He even enticed a reluctant Stacey on stage for more ribbing and a pseudo-ventriloquist gag. Watching the battle of wills and wits between er... victim and tormentor wore a little thin after a few minutes but kudos to Lovegrove for stepping outside the comedy square once again.

Further surprises emerged when it was revealed that our final act for the evening would be the rookie Emma Olsen, who until now had been sitting in the crowd. Olsen chose to rise to the challenge of facing her biggest crowd ever, with no preparation, while “really trashed”. As she began, I’m not sure who was more nervous: her or the audience. After a few minutes she started to waver. Her dirty style got some laughs, and gaining confidence, she made a mid-set confession – even though, she said, she saw herself as a feminist, her first instinct when placed on the spot like this was to show some skin. Then after her final, quite funny gag, Lovegrove returned again. In his undies. It was a Late Laughs Tradition, he explained cheekily, to Take Off One’s Clothes. Enter the rest of the night’s comedians, bar Chandrahasen, wearing only cardboard cylinders advertising a radio station. Olsen was handed her ‘costume’ and gently encouraged to follow through with her aforementioned impulse. At the point of her decision, Wrigley’s cylinder accidentally(?) fell open, to reveal his whole body – portly, and apparently penisless (you know how to do it, boys). When, at Lovegrove’s urging, we looked back at Emma, she was nude, the hoarding just maintaining her dignity.

As the five waddled off and the stage and bar slowly emptied, I felt as if I had been part of a celebration of comedy; the caustic, the crude and the clever . I don’t think it would have been the same at Downstage.

For full programme, venue and show details on this and other Comedy Festival events, visit comedyfestival.co.nz.