REVIEW:
Stephen K Amos – The Spokesman; Tom Green – Live Opera House, Wellington, May 5
Reviewed by Daven Parsons-Piwari
The New Zealand International Comedy Festival brings to town all sorts of international delights for our entertainment pleasure, two such worldwide acts being Brit Stephen K Amos and Canadian Tom Green.
Amos’ show had a certain forum atmosphere that came from his constant interaction with the audience in all sorts of ways, from friendly banter, flirting with young males in the audience and, at one point, co-ordinating a prank on a single audience member while they left for the loo.
The idea was to all raise our hands when Amos asked us if we picked our nose as a child and see if we could get her to admit it through sheer peer pressure alone. (It totally worked.)
The audience was incorporated so much, in fact, that it barely felt like a show, and more like just a bunch of people hanging out with Stephen K Amos in a very large room.
Amos owned the crowd from the start with a mixture of sharp wit, quick thinking and charisma.
His first jokes defaulted to being about the fact that he was black, but thankfully it was more about experiences he’s had instead of “The difference between black people and white people is … ” routine that’s right up there in the overused section of comedy with airline food and gender roles.
Coming in louder and more in-your-face is Tom Green, who ranks just below Dane Cook in the decibel meter in terms of his delivery.
Green’s show, in direct contrast to Amos, alienated the audience early, as he awkwardly took the stage and yelled at individuals in a manner closer to a drill sergeant than a performer.
Green’s set relied on shock value and extreme absurdity for humour and tended to consist of angry rants about the state of the world and how things like Facebook are ruining the way we interact, just in time to shred an audience member for being bathed in the blue light of Facebook mobile from his smartphone.
It may have seemed rude but I can hardly blame the guy, as I ended up checking my watch every few minutes to the point where I was just politely waiting for the show to end.
There’s only so much being yelled at I can take before it all just gets filtered into the “loud noise comprehension” part of my brain usually reserved for vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers.
While there weren’t many jokes with conventional punchlines, Green repeated the ones that did exist enough times to burn them into the audience members’ brains to make it a show we would remember against our will.
If you had told me beforehand that the British comedian would be the mild and soft-spoken one and the Canadian one would be loud and obnoxious, I would have thought you had them mixed up, but I guess that’s what I get for thinking in stereotypes.
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