Raised in Palmerston North, Paul Horan wasa member of the late-80s comedy group
Facial DBX, which also featured Jon Bridges
and Jeremy Corbett. He co-founded the New
Zealand Comedy Festival in 1992, then set
up Auckland’s Classic Comedy Club in 1998.
After writing on the television series Topp
Twins III, he moved to Australia in 2000 where
he set up the writers’ room for Rove. He hassince become a senior producer and script
consultant on both sides of the Tasman forshows such as the ground-breaking comedy
Problems for the ABC as well as being a
co-creator of The Project. His recent New
Zealand projects have included Super City,and he was executive producer on Aroha
Bridge for Piki Productions. He produced andwrote the documentary series Funny As.

From the Kiwi Concert Party to The Topp
Twins, Billy T. James to Rose Matafeo,
Fred Dagg to Flight of the Conchords, New
Zealanders have made each other laugh inways distinctive to these islands.

Which is why I am so pleased you are holding this bookin your hands. Not because it has jokes in it (there
are probably some jokes in it) but because it maps
where comedy has been in New Zealand. My own roadstarted with theatre, then children’s TV, then sketch andcharacter comedy, stand-up and storytelling. Other
people’s roads wind their way through music, radio,
cartoons and plays. Regardless of the route any of us
have taken, this book records the moments when an idea
has made the journey from one mind to another at the
speed of laughter. ‘See there? That’s where comedy has
been, and look where it might be going next.’

Funny As is the big, authoritative, hilarious
story of New Zealand comedy.

Funny As tells the story of comedy in thiscountry through more than 300 pictures
and an engaging text based on over 100
interviews with our best comedians.
Published alongside a major TVNZ
documentary series, at a time when comedy
has never been bigger, the book takes us
inside the comedy clubs, cabarets andtelevision studios where comedians work; it
charts the rise of cartoons and skits, parodyand stand-up; it introduces us to how New
Zealand’s funniest men and women havemade sense (and nonsense) out of thiscountry’s changing culture and society.

Paul Horan andPhilip Matthews

Philip Matthews is a senior journalist,
reviewer and editorial writer whose work has
appeared in the NZ Listener, Metro, Sunday
Star-Times, Landfall, The Press, The Wire,
The Spinoff and a host of other publications
during his 25 years in the business. For morethan ten years he was an award-winning film
reviewer for the NZ Listener, with two stints
as the magazine’s arts and books editor.
He sporadically maintains a film blog andis more active than he would like to be on
Twitter. He has never performed comedy andcan barely remember jokes, but people tellhim he’s funny. He lives in Christchurch withhis wife and three daughters.

Live comedy mostly exists in a single moment in time – inthat split second between punchline and laughter. Aska happy punter the day after a live show which gag they
liked best, or what the show was ‘about’, and it’s a rareperson who can re-create any moments, unless they
were taking notes. Which would be weird. Each morningwhen you drive out of one town and head to the next, youunderstand you’re not leaving anything tangible behind(apart from the odd phone charger or some cheese past
its best). There’s nothing anyone can point to and say,‘See that? There was a comedy show there just before.’

The bookof the TV series– Michele A’Court

made in association with

Cover photo: Billy T. James,
courtesy of TVNZ.

The Story ofNew Zealand
ComedyPaul Horan andPhilip Matthews
With a foreword byMichele A’Court

13 Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s

looking
for aplace tostand (up)The story of comedy in the first part of the twentieth century had often been
about venue managers searching for comedians to perform in their spaces.
But by the 1980s, many venues had been demolished and the owners of
those that survived lacked the budgets that the likes of J. C. Williamson or Fullers
had in the 1920s. Television ruled and if you wanted to perform comedy, it was the
only game in town. Or so it seemed. The development of a live comedy circuit over
the two decades that followed is not just a story about performers becoming known
to the public but a story of how they created their own structures and venues inwhich to do this. It distinguished live comedy from other performing arts – there
were no traditional structures, educational traditions or established funders such asphilanthropic donors or government grants. There were no forms to fill out. The live
comedy industry that was built in New Zealand in the 1980s and endured into thetwenty-first century was built by performers and a handful of specialist producers.
The history of live comedy, especially stand-up, is largely a history of the rooms
comedians played in and the festivals they created. A venue becomes synonymous witha local comedy culture. The history of stand-up in London is dominated by The Comedy
Store; in Los Angeles, it is The Improv. In Auckland, it eventually became The Classic.
Comedy clubs were making money all over the world at the beginning of the
1980s, but not in New Zealand. The problem was that stand-up comedy, which
dominated the clubs, was a form of performing with little precedent in this country.
But when local promoters saw Australian comedians such as Rodney Rude, Austen
Tayshus and, notably, George ‘I’m Tuff!’ Smilovici tour off the backs of records andlimited TV exposure, they began to wonder about what could be done. Graham J.
Smith, owner of Auckland’s Retro nightclub, opted to give it a shot in early 1984.
A weekly competition was hosted by Chris Hegan, a comedian from a well-known
family of performers and agents (his parents, Eddie and Elaine Hegan, launched Billy
T. James). A weird assortment of acts bowled up to Retro on successive Wednesdaynights before a group was put together by one of the heat winners, Willy De Wit, andhis friend, fledgling promoter Scott Blanks. The group of De Wit, Hegan, Ian Harcourt,
Dean Butler and Peter Murphy named themselves Funny Business.
Over the following six years, Funny Business developed a mix of sketches,character monologues, original songs and stand-up that heralded a new generationof comedy. Their two series for TVNZ owed something to the energy of alternative
British cult hit The Young Ones. Unlike David McPhail and Jon Gadsby, who continued
to dominate TV sketch comedy, Funny Business’s shows were almost entirely freeof political satire; they were filmed mostly on location rather than in a studio andfeatured a new song written for each episode. One of their best-remembered wasLive comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 221

TOP Funny Business as The Hoons.

222 | Funny As

ABOVE LEFT The album released tocoincide with the first series, 1988.

ABOVE RIGHT Funny Business poseas a Dunedin band for a sketch in
the first series.

TOP LEFT Funny Business Tour

Flyer 1989.

TOP RIGHT Lucy Lawless made her

TV debut on Funny Business.

ABOVE During the shooting of the‘Norman the Mormon’ sketch in thefirst series of Funny Business, 1988.

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 223

OPPOSITE (Left to right, fromtop) Facial DBX: Dave Horn,
Paul Horan, Nigel Corbett; Jon
Bridges, David Downs, Paul
Yates; Jeremy Corbett.
LEFT (From left) Stephanie
Millar, Alison Wall and Amanda
Tollemache in the first series ofFunny Business, 1988.

‘Norman the Mormon’, a song about celibacy,
bicycles and door-knocking set to a Muddy
Waters blues riff:
My name is Elder Norman
I’m a-knock on your front door, man
I’m a Mormon
Norman the Mormon
Produced by Tony Holden, previously a director
on A Week of It, Funny Business was fast-paced
and featured a line-up of long-overdue fresh
faces. While roles for women were minor, strong
performances from a cast that included Alison
Wall and newcomer Lucy Lawless in her TV
debut were an improvement over what had gone
before. But it was live that Funny Business madetheir most lasting impact. After a handful ofgigs at the Performance Café, they settled intoa Wednesday-night residency at the Windsor
Castle, a rock venue in Parnell. This was the

224 | Funny As

making of the group. Not only could they try out
and quickly discard material – they also taught
an audience how to be a comedy audience, asHarcourt put it.
If they were coming to see Hello Sailor or apunk band, they knew what the rules were. They
knew what the rules were if they were going toa theatre show. But people were self-conscious
about being a comedy audience. Early on in
those Windsor shows we set up this deliberately
corny warm-up routine, which encouraged
people to laugh out loud without thinking, ‘People
are going to think I’m an idiot if I laugh out loud’.
That was the level of everyone just working out
how this works. I think we succeeded.1
With Blanks, who went on to co-found The
Classic comedy club, taking on promotion andmanaging the finances, Funny Business became agoing concern. They toured universities and rock

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 225

venues where many young audiences had theirfirst experience of live comedy. Audiences grew
after the first TV series and, as rock music waswhat the audiences knew, that was the attitude
Funny Business started to adopt. For many
students and others who saw Funny Businessand the Front Lawn perform in the 1980s, doing
live comedy and getting a bit famous suddenly
seemed possible for the first time.
Funny Business tours through Palmerston
North were particularly influential. A flourishing
scene attached to Massey University had led
to the formation of the group Facial DBX (seeChapter 3), who began to realise there was anappetite for touring comedy if performers werebrave enough to try. A university touring circuit had
been developed by the New Zealand Students’
Arts Council, which operated from 1973 to 1992
and usually focused on music acts touring as a
backdrop to drinking in Orientation week at thestart of the first term. Facial DBX embarked on
their first tour in 1987, which was followed in 1989
and 1990. It cemented an idea that comedy wassomething they could consider doing for a living.
Live comedy began to flourish in other ways.
Theatresports originated in Canada and wasan improvisation comedy format that explodedin the late 1980s in New Zealand. From thefirst workshops to the televising of the national
final took just over one year. Through schools
it became one of the most commonly taught
forms of comedy, and even thirty years later it
dominates the corporate comedy scene throughsuch groups as The Improv Bandits, based in
Auckland, and The Improvisors from Wellington.
But for stand-ups the 1980s was the time of
the talent quest. This was a time-honoured format:
performers work for free and if a prize is offered,
there will always be someone prepared to try
their luck. In the 1980s, it was a simple first stepfor promoters who had never originated shows
and for audiences who were still adapting to live
comedy. The idea was to flush out the stars of
tomorrow and make careers overnight. But as this226 | Funny As

Each episode of Funny
Business featured a song.
The alternative national
anthem was an early hit.

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 227

MC Chris Hegan (front right)
and Radio Hauraki’s Kevin‘Blackie’ Black (centre back)with the Comedy Store
finalists, 1989.

was long before YouTube, there were few places to learn how to construct and shapea stand-up act other than listening carefully to comedy records on vinyl. It became
clear to anyone who watched that the writing would take years to catch up with theambitions of performers.
Paul Walker secured the New Zealand rights to the name The Comedy Storeand mounted a competition in 1988, with several heats and a final. Hosted by
Funny Business, it was held at the rock club The Powerstation with an atmosphereclose to the combative style of Sydney’s Comedy Store, which was infamous forresembling an arena more than a venue and featuring an abusive audience. But as
it worked so well in Australia, there was a certain logic in assuming this was how
it should be done in New Zealand. The Comedy Store pulled in game all-comers
and made a feature of Alan Martinbus, billed as New Zealand’s worst comedian.
Also known in Auckland as the busker who played Deutschland Über Alles on thebagpipes, Martinbus loved the attention.
Vicki Walker had been working in theatre and doing shows at another of Paul
Walker’s comedy initiatives, Le Bom, on Monday nights at Auckland venue The Forge.
She entered the first of these competitions.
When I started doing it, there wasn’t anyone else to watch. There was Funny
Business – the boys were doing it. When I entered the Gluepot stand-up comedy[competition], I think I won one of the Auckland heats . . . but when I first went
on stage, they wouldn’t let me speak, the heckling was so loud. One guy yelled
out, ‘Hey, chickie baby, you on the pill?’ I said, ‘No, but it’s a fucking shame yourmother wasn’t,’ and the audience laughed. I said to them, ‘I know this is different,
but I do think I have a right to speak on stage. I’m going to go off, and I’m going tocome back again.’ When I came back, that was the first time they allowed me totry out some material on stage.2
In 1989 The Comedy Store organised a national tour in an attempt to widen the talentpool, but this was to be the end of the line. In Palmerston North, the crowd pelted theperformers with savouries.3 The negative publicity and impact of The Comedy Store
tours showed future comedy initiatives what to avoid. This was a spectacle, not the
blueprint for an industry.
By 1990 a number of initiatives developing almost entirely independently ofeach other caused a scene to take root outside of Auckland. After a few attempts,
the Wellington Fringe Festival became a genuine companion to the official Arts
Festival, and has gone on to be the premier fringe in New Zealand and one of thecapital’s chief comedy incubators. While Wellington was packed with independent
theatre initiatives, the publicity umbrella and centralised venue organisation that a
Fringe Festival created made younger, riskier projects more viable. For comedy, thismeant there was an opportunity to put on shows that theatre programmers had notusually been keen on. BATS Theatre had been open to comedy but had to balance a
programme that incorporated all emerging work.
Just down the road at Circa Theatre, there was a different response to the rise of

228 | Funny As

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 229

comedy. In 1988 Kate Jason-Smith established
Hen’s Teeth, a line-up show featuring women
performers. The group was remarkable for its
inclusion of multiple generations of performers– Lee Hatherly, Kate Harcourt and Bub Bridger
brought older character comedy and monologues
to the stage, which was incredibly rare at the time
(as the show’s name might imply). Hen’s Teeth
also provided a stage for Carmel McGlone andLorae Parry’s characters Digger and Nudger
and the impersonations of Pinky Agnew. A
commitment to character comedy rather thanstand-up is part of the reason Hen’s Teeth has
continued for more than thirty years.
In Christchurch, 1990 saw the debut of the
improv format Scared Scriptless. As we havealready seen, Theatresports exploded in the
1980s and smaller, more sustainable formats
spun out of larger theatre seasons. Attachedto The Court Theatre, Scared Scriptless waslean and fostered an ongoing ensemble throughregular performance and workshopping. FounderMichael Robinson, working alongside Lori Dungey
and Jim McLarty, brought a transformative
Canadian influence into the early improv scene in
New Zealand.
In Auckland there were fresh moves to makethings happen for comedians, in response to thespectacular competitions that dominated thelate 1980s. Competition veteran Vicki Walker andproducer Ali Duffey created a place for women
performers and writers. Titled Girls Gotta Eat, theshows were an immediate success, partly due
to a unique approach in which a regular series
of workshops ran in parallel with the monthly
gigs. Walker and Duffey believed that great
performances depended on fostering great writing.
Another secret of their success was staging showson Sunday afternoons, making them accessible
to women with children or women who wanted to
avoid dodgy venues at night.
The first two-hour-plus show, directed by Mari
Wilson from Inside Out Theatre, featured a stellar
line-up from all over the Auckland performing

230 | Funny As

ABOVE Poster for the first Girls

Gotta Eat show, 1990.

OPPOSITE Lee Hatherly

performing in Hen’s Teeth.

scene: Lynda Topp, Alison Wall, Fiona Edgar, Suzanne McAleer, Michele Hine, Celia
Nicholson, Kathryn Burnett, Miranda Wilson, Juliet Monaghan and Brenda Kendall.
Kendall had been doing stand-up and character comedy throughout the 1980s at
intermittent alternative Auckland venues. Girls Gotta Eat consistently drew more than
500 punters per gig and Walker and Duffey soon began to think about a potential TV
format. For nearly two years, the themed shows appeared and built a loyal following,
but plans to take it further dissolved as performers moved on to other projects.
Nevertheless, for the venues and festivals that followed, Girls Gotta Eat offered avaluable precedent – it showed that there was a need for something more than thecompetition model of the 1980s or the beer-soaked Orientation gig. The focus on
writing also raised the standards of what could be achieved.
These initiatives all demonstrated the fundamental truth that underpinned comedy
in New Zealand – there were no institutions or structures other than those that
performers and producers made for themselves. The year 1990 was pivotal, when
performers began to organise themselves and audiences started to think differently
about local comedy.

Into the 1990s: ‘nice boys, no sleaze’
It is hard to learn comedy without an audience. In Auckland in 1991, a number of
comedians realised that the city needed a regular venue if there was to be any
chance of a proper scene developing. Performers scoured pubs and hotels forsuitable places. Comedy cabaret veteran Colin Parris, who had worked in both
New Zealand and Australia since the 1970s, approached an inner-city tourist hoteland opened Abby’s in 1991. Staging a low-key competition to attract comedians
introduced him to Matt Elliott, who ended up helping him to run the night. Audiences
fluctuated over the two years Abby’s operated but it was an important proving
ground for acts who had often got their earliest taste of live comedy during thecompetitions of the 1980s, and the venue became notable as the first weekly
comedy gig. Abby’s acts A. K. (Andrew Kovacevich), Mike Gray, Greg Johnson andPhil Parker went on to tour with Parris and Elliott as the Laughter Mafia.
Meanwhile Facial DBX had drifted to Auckland from Palmerston North. They had
the same idea about starting a venue. As none of the group were Aucklanders it tooka while to find their feet, but in 1992 they settled on the newly opened Irish bar Kitty
O’Brien’s. The square upstairs room seated about a hundred people and had the lookand feel of overseas comedy venues. Best of all, it was cheap. The bar soon became
a home for other comedians who had begun to come north in search of live work.
Michele A’Court recalls:
Comedians seemed different from the touring musicians. They weren’t trying to
bed you – they were genuinely interested in encouraging your work. It felt collegial
right from the start. Nice boys, no sleaze. Dusty theatre rather than grimy pub
background. The community felt like a safe place for a woman to be.4

232 | Funny As

TOP Mike King and Andrew Clayon stage at Kitty O’Brien’s,
Auckland, mid-1990s.
LEFT Andrew Kovacevich
on stage at Kitty O’Brien’s,
Auckland, mid-1990s.

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 233

TOP LEFT Jeremy and Nigel

Corbett in the stairwell/dressingroom at Kitty O’Brien’s,
early 1990s.
TOP RIGHT Dean Butler on stageat Kitty O’Brien’s, early 1990s.
ABOVE Nigel (left) and Jeremy

Corbett with Mike King (centre),backstage at Kitty O’Brien’s,
mid-1990s.
RIGHT Jason Hoyte and Jonathan

Brugh as Sugar and Spice at
Kitty O’Brien’s, mid-1990s.

OPPOSITE An early promo shot of

Te Radar (right) and Brendhan
Lovegrove, late 1990s.

234 | Funny As

The programme for the first
Comedy Festival Gala at theWatershed Theatre, 1994.

‘I want to do
five minutes
and if I don’t
make anyone
laugh, I’ll
shout the bar’
– Mike KingWith its beer-crate stage and borrowed soundsystem, Kitty’s also set expectations for future
stand-up audiences. It could be rowdy at times,
but heckling was not compulsory and comedians
did their material instead of fighting the audience.
While it was unmistakably male-dominated, it
was not terrifyingly so. From the start it was morediverse and less initimidating than the Australianscene. Many comedians who became household
names did early gigs there, including Jeremy
Corbett, Kevin Smith, Ewen Gilmour, Te Radar,
Brendhan Lovegrove and A’Court. Few of themknew much about structuring a stand-up routine
other than Andrew Clay, who had returned aftera few years on the tougher Sydney circuit. Clay’s
carefully constructed sets were watched eagerly
by the performers, and none of them paid more
attention than a chef from the suburbs named
Mike King. Dave Horn of Facial DBX remembered
King’s first night.
He turned up and said, ‘I want to do five minutes
and if I don’t make anyone laugh, I’ll shout thebar.’ That was how he was introduced. And I
was sitting at the bar going ‘wow’. The followingnight, Ben Elton was trying out his material.
Mike King stood up on stage and he killed.
He was hilarious. And I remember Ben Eltonsaying, ‘Oh, this bloke’s going to go far, ain’t
he?’ . . . That was a pretty cool moment.5

Poster for the show Pulp Comedy, from which the TV series got its name.

238 | Funny As

Within a year, Kitty O’Brien’s had gone weekly andsatellite gigs started at the Masonic in Devonport,
the Horse and Trap in Mt Eden and The Outback
Inn in Hamilton. Momentum was starting to build.
The easing of liquor licensing rules meant othervenues started to spring up. The Temple Café on
Upper Queen Street added comedy and spoken
word nights to its diet of live music.
TV also started to notice. Not only was TV
keen to get in on the international trend forstand-up comedy – for many New Zealanders,
the series Seinfeld was their first exposure when
it debuted in the early 1990s – but a slumping
economy made cheap formats more attractive.

Stand-up shows, especially when run ascompetitions, could be made for a fraction of thecost of sitcoms or sketch shows. TVNZ put A Bit
After Ten to air in 1993, hosted by Jeremy andNigel Corbett. Australian producers and directors
Michael Boughen and Wayne Cameron created afast-paced, commercial format and despite a lateslot, it was renewed for another season.
While looking for Kitty O’Brien’s, Paul Horanfrom Facial DBX had met Margi Mellsop, an
independent producer who was crucial in theformation of the Watershed Theatre – a seriesof venues surrounding the then run-down
Viaduct Basin and Hobson Wharf. Not only was
the Watershed open to featuring live comedy,
it became the venue for the first New Zealand
comedy festival in 1993. In that first year, thefestival capitalised partly on the theatre having
bookings for a studio space it had not yet built.
The solution was to roll a number of bookings
together and brand it as a festival, adding
headliners Peter Rowsthorn and Wendy Harmer
from Australia. Encouraged by the result, theWatershed mounted an expanded festival in 1994.
By the end of that year, the theatre’s originators
were less involved and the pressure of running
an independent theatre along with a fast-growing
comedy festival became a problem. Mellsop andHoran broke away and ran the festival under its
own trust. From there, the New Zealand Comedy
International Festival grew fast.
An often-repeated piece of showbiz wisdom isthat you can’t learn comedy, you just have to do it.
While this is largely true in stand-up, improv has
been taught with great success in New Zealandschools since the late 1980s. The founding of thecircus school at the Christchurch Polytechnic
Institute of Technology was a tertiary initiativethat taught many performers who went on to
comedy careers. The Circo-Arts course wasunique when it was set up in 1996 and by the time
it was forced to close after the 2011 Christchurch
earthquake, it had had a huge influence on thecity’s performance scene. Its most illustrious

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 239

alumni is Sam Wills, now known as Tape Face.
Wills came to national prominence when hewon best new face on TV’s Pulp Comedy with asilent act that was a smart contemporary use ofmime and circus skills. He shaped the act into afull-length show, Boy With Tape on His Face, that
played at the Melbourne International Comedy
Festival in 2008. In the same year he moved
to London, where his career took off. He madethe news back home with his turn on the Royal
Variety Performance in 2011 and as a finalist in theeleventh season of America’s Got Talent in 2016.
He is now playing a residency in Las Vegas at theHouse of Tape, a specially adapted venue within
Harrah’s Casino.
The circus tradition also fed into theChristchurch World Buskers Festival – now
called the Bread and Circus World Buskers
Festival – that started in 1994. This has been

New Zealand’s best open-access arts event,where most performances are free andoutdoors. By 2012, 300,000 people wereattending, and it has become a vital outlet forbuskers, burlesque and physical performers, aswell as more traditional comedians.6
In 1995 the first independent stand-alone
comedy festival in Auckland had been rebranded
Laugh, and it was expanding steadily. In thesame year, Comedyfest created a gig called Pulp
Comedy and mounted it at The Powerstation. It
was a meaningful return to a landmark Auckland
venue by local comedy – the venue that had
seen the competitions of the late 1980s. But thedifference was that local comedians were doing
their own assured routines in their own festival
to a crowd that had grown with them. It was thegig that told everyone stand-up had arrived, at aplace that comedians had created themselves.

The legend of Blackie

Sam Wills in an early street
performance, before hebecame known as Tape Face.

240 | Funny As

Commercial radio has played an important supportingrole in both producing and promoting New Zealand
comedy. Early on, comedy was a way to distinguishcommercial operators from the dour publicbroadcasters, especially during breakfast shows. The
most famous was Kevin ‘Blackie’ Black (1943–2013),
who was the highest-paid radio announcer in New
Zealand at the peak of his career. His speciality
on Radio Hauraki was the prank phone call. In aparticularly notorious example, he rang the Ministryof Mines to claim that he had dug a 100-foot hole and

Kevin Black in the studio with
Billy T. James, mid-1980s.

found uranium. When the beleaguered official asked if
he had any qualifications, Black replied, ‘No, but I havean uncle who was a coal miner down in Westport.’
He released a stream of albums in the 1980s and1990s that compiled the phone calls and parody
songs that were a staple of his radio shows. Black’s
biggest success came in 1981, when he parodied
Deane Waretini’s song about racial harmony, ‘The
Bridge’, as Kevin Blackatini and the Frigids singing‘The Fridge’. The proceeds went to the family of oneof their workmates who had died in a car accident.

Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s | 241

Raised in Palmerston North, Paul Horan wasa member of the late-80s comedy group
Facial DBX, which also featured Jon Bridges
and Jeremy Corbett. He co-founded the New
Zealand Comedy Festival in 1992, then set
up Auckland’s Classic Comedy Club in 1998.
After writing on the television series Topp
Twins III, he moved to Australia in 2000 where
he set up the writers’ room for Rove. He hassince become a senior producer and script
consultant on both sides of the Tasman forshows such as the ground-breaking comedy
Problems for the ABC as well as being a
co-creator of The Project. His recent New
Zealand projects have included Super City,and he was executive producer on Aroha
Bridge for Piki Productions. He produced andwrote the documentary series Funny As.

From the Kiwi Concert Party to The Topp
Twins, Billy T. James to Rose Matafeo,
Fred Dagg to Flight of the Conchords, New
Zealanders have made each other laugh inways distinctive to these islands.

Which is why I am so pleased you are holding this bookin your hands. Not because it has jokes in it (there
are probably some jokes in it) but because it maps
where comedy has been in New Zealand. My own roadstarted with theatre, then children’s TV, then sketch andcharacter comedy, stand-up and storytelling. Other
people’s roads wind their way through music, radio,
cartoons and plays. Regardless of the route any of us
have taken, this book records the moments when an idea
has made the journey from one mind to another at the
speed of laughter. ‘See there? That’s where comedy has
been, and look where it might be going next.’

Funny As is the big, authoritative, hilarious
story of New Zealand comedy.

Funny As tells the story of comedy in thiscountry through more than 300 pictures
and an engaging text based on over 100
interviews with our best comedians.
Published alongside a major TVNZ
documentary series, at a time when comedy
has never been bigger, the book takes us
inside the comedy clubs, cabarets andtelevision studios where comedians work; it
charts the rise of cartoons and skits, parodyand stand-up; it introduces us to how New
Zealand’s funniest men and women havemade sense (and nonsense) out of thiscountry’s changing culture and society.

Paul Horan andPhilip Matthews

Philip Matthews is a senior journalist,
reviewer and editorial writer whose work has
appeared in the NZ Listener, Metro, Sunday
Star-Times, Landfall, The Press, The Wire,
The Spinoff and a host of other publications
during his 25 years in the business. For morethan ten years he was an award-winning film
reviewer for the NZ Listener, with two stints
as the magazine’s arts and books editor.
He sporadically maintains a film blog andis more active than he would like to be on
Twitter. He has never performed comedy andcan barely remember jokes, but people tellhim he’s funny. He lives in Christchurch withhis wife and three daughters.

Live comedy mostly exists in a single moment in time – inthat split second between punchline and laughter. Aska happy punter the day after a live show which gag they
liked best, or what the show was ‘about’, and it’s a rareperson who can re-create any moments, unless they
were taking notes. Which would be weird. Each morningwhen you drive out of one town and head to the next, youunderstand you’re not leaving anything tangible behind(apart from the odd phone charger or some cheese past
its best). There’s nothing anyone can point to and say,‘See that? There was a comedy show there just before.’

The bookof the TV series– Michele A’Court

made in association with

Cover photo: Billy T. James,
courtesy of TVNZ.

The Story ofNew Zealand
ComedyPaul Horan andPhilip Matthews
With a foreword byMichele A’Court