Funny As: The Story of New Zealand Comedy

By Paul Horan and Philip Matthews

A big, authoritative, hilarious illustrated account of New Zealand's funniest comedians.From the Kiwi Concert Party to The Topp Twins, Billy T. James to Rose Matafeo, Fred Dagg to Flight of the Conchords and Taika Waititi, New Zealanders have made each other laugh in ways distinctive to these islands. Funny As tells the story of comedy in this country 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 and television studios where comedians work; it charts the rise of cartoons and skits, parody and stand-up; it introduces us to how New Zealand's funniest men and women have made sense (and nonsense) out of this country's changing culture and society. Funny As is the authoritative, hilarious story of New Zealand comedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jul 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781776710447

Book preview

First published 2019

Auckland University Press

University of Auckland

Private Bag 92019

Auckland 1142

New Zealand

www.press.auckland.ac.nz

© text Paul Horan and Philip Matthews, 2019

© images as credited pages 335–36

ISBN 978 177671 044 7

Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

This book is copyright. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without prior permission of the publisher. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

Design by Strategy Creative

Contents

Foreword by Michele A’Court

Introduction

1. Bloody laughter: war and the birth of New Zealand comedy

2. Comedy and writers: blokes, bastards and outbreaks of beauty

3. Lessons in comedy: universities and capping revues

4. ‘Bold and blue’: female impersonators, cabaret and variety

5. Comedians and politicians: ‘stuff that doesn’t really matter’

6. Comedy and theatre: million-dollar ideas

7. Directors on the edge: comedy on screen

8. The start of it: TV comedy up to the 1980s

9. John Clarke: the man from the audience

10. Billy T. James: between two worlds

11. The Topp Twins: only in New Zealand

12. The Front Lawn: sons of the suburbs

13. Live comedy in the 1980s and 1990s: looking for a place to stand (up)

14. Breaking the rules: TV in the 1990s and beyond

15. Naked in the house of spirits: Samoan comedy

16. Live comedy in the twenty-first century: the new establishment

17. Kin folk: Flight of the Conchords

18. Taika Waititi: a Māori in space

19. Rose and other names: a new comedy generation

Notes

Bibliography

Illustration credits

Acknowledgements

Foreword

It’s February 2019, and we’ve just pulled in to Reefton. The nice woman at the motel gives us our keys and says, hang on, she almost forgot, Daisy left this for you. There’s a plate of whitebait fritters – still warm – nestled between slices of white bread, and another plate with ginger crunch, caramel slice and banana cake. These are the signs that tell you tonight is going to be a good show. Because all you ever need is for someone to be pleased that you turned up.

This was show number twelve of our stand-up comedy tour of twenty-seven towns – most of them small like Reefton (population 1206 at last count), with a few cities like Whāngārei and Whanganui thrown in. Jeremy Elwood and I had taken to the road with Arts On Tour because, even though we’ve been living together for nineteen years, our jobs as comedians and writers mean we barely get to see each other in the normal run of things. So touring can be our way of hanging out together – just us, in a car, with our manager and friend Richard Carrington, and some of the best scenery you can find anywhere in the world, plus – in the South Island at least – daily access to cheese rolls.

We play tiny theatres, school and community halls, the odd pub and – in this instance – the Reefton Club, where, if you want an alcoholic beverage, you have to sign in. Our audiences range in age from high-school student to superannuitant. In Geraldine, the organisers were the local kindergarten committee, and in Ōpōtiki it was the community’s librarians. In Putaruru, the town’s fire siren went off and I stopped the show to make sure the local volunteer fire brigade chief sitting down the front wasn’t holding the keys to the truck.

The first time I played Putaruru, it was 1992 and I was heavily pregnant with my daughter. I’m a grandmother now. I still tour like this for the company, and because I love whitebait fritter sandwiches and being in a room where someone might have the keys to the fire truck, and for the joy of playing tiny theatres lovingly cared for by their people.

Daisy has been bringing shows like ours to Reefton for more years than anyone can remember. But she remembers I was here with other comedians in 2009 – Justine Smith and Irene Pink. Now she mentions it, I recall we’d been anxious that night because the front row was largely made up of women who looked like our nanas, and we weren’t sure how warmly they would embrace the kind of comedy we’d usually do at a Queen Street comedy club. I suggested we imagine that, rather than being someone’s nana, they were actually retired West Coast sex workers and therefore likely to be up for any kind of nonsense. Reaching back, I seem to recall that at least one of them was so delighted with us, instead of applauding at the end, she banged her walking stick up and down with tremendous vigour. Pretty sure she was sitting at Daisy’s table on this return visit.

It is an extraordinary thing if you let yourself think about it. Not just the madness of walking into a room full of people you’ve never met and hoping to find the things that will make them laugh. But also that on this tour, here were two city people telling their stories about gun control, pay equity, gender equality and whale strandings to a bunch of complete strangers living quite different lives in very different places, and making them laugh together, at the same time, for the same reasons. And knowing at every single second of the forty-five minutes you are standing on stage in front of them if it is working, if that joke has landed, if the idea you have in your head has made it all the way to theirs, and how it makes them feel.

Comedy is, I think, the most direct relationship between performer and audience. There is no one standing between you and them – no scriptwriter, no director, no prop, no costume, no gatekeeper … Every time they laugh, it’s like you just shared a secret with each other. And then it’s gone, and you look for the next secret you can share.

Live comedy mostly exists in a single moment in time – in that split second between punchline and laughter. Ask a happy punter the day after a live show which gag they liked best, or what the show was ‘about’, and it’s a rare person who can re-create any moments, unless they were taking notes. Which would be weird. Each morning when you drive out of one town and head to the next, you understand 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.’

Which is why I am so pleased you are holding this book in 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 road started with theatre, then children’s TV, then sketch and character 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.’

The week after we finished our tour of twenty-seven towns, I headed to WOMAD in New Plymouth. New Zealand’s version of the World of Music, Arts and Dance festival now includes a ‘World of Words’ – novelists, non-fiction writers, poets and comedians talking about or performing their work. My plane landed on Friday 15 March at noon, less than two hours before the massacre at two Christchurch mosques. The Prime Minister was on our flight. She held an extraordinary press conference at our hotel, then left for Wellington and then Christchurch.

You have to be somewhere when the worst thing happens, and WOMAD was a good and kind place to be – its kaupapa of inclusion and its celebration of diversity is the opposite of what that atrocity represents. My show was on Sunday night, one of the last performances in the programme. You wonder if you can do it, or should do it. And then you remember that that’s exactly your job – to bring levity in a time of gravity. Hundreds of people pack themselves tightly onto the lawn in front of the stage, and you talk about the thing, and how you are feeling, and then you find the stories that make them laugh.

Just before the show starts, someone drops by backstage and brings fresh peaches and whole walnuts, and kind words. That’s how you know it’s going to be a great show. Because all you ever need is for someone to be pleased you turned up.

— Michele A’Court, March 2019

Introduction

‘Where did I get my bag? I pinched it.’

That’s either the most famous or most infamous joke told on New Zealand television. Certainly a whole lot of people saw it. It was the mid-1980s, and Billy T. James was the country’s most successful entertainer. At his peak, he earned a reported $600,000 per year and a fan club sent badges to members on his behalf. Some 44 per cent of New Zealand viewers watched The Billy T James Show on Saturday nights. Or, as the Listener put it, ‘By 1986 half the people in this country were switching channels to watch Billy T James.’ In the same year, he was awarded an MBE for services to entertainment.

The sketch is only eight seconds long. The location is a street in downtown Auckland. James approaches the camera, smoking a cigarette, wearing an army surplus jacket, mirrored sunglasses and an afro wig, looking like an off-duty gang member. You have to imagine an invisible interviewer asking the comedian where he bought his bag. James doesn’t answer in his real voice; he opts instead for the exaggerated ‘dumb Māori’ accent that he used when he played an idiotic newsreader. The sketch sent up a high-rotation commercial of the time, promoting a New Zealand company, Lands for Bags. More than thirty years later, the send-up is better remembered than the original.

What did New Zealanders make of this joke? Many things, it seems. Some Māori resented James apparently getting rich by peddling negative images of Māori to Pākehā audiences. Others thought that he was giving Pākehā an education in racial discrimination. Some Pākehā laughed, enjoying seeing their own stereotypes of Māori confirmed. Others cringed, sensing that James was poking a stick into their own eye as well as his own. The ‘Where’d I get my bag?’ sketch worked because it played into deep currents in New Zealand society and culture.

We are starting with this joke to show that when you begin writing about something funny, you often end up somewhere else. We would never pretend that comedy is a great scalpel with which to spill the guts of a nation. Comedy is too concerned with itself and its audience to take on the burden of doing something else. And we don’t pretend that one can tell the full history of New Zealand through the funny bits. The strands of comedy are too episodic and too diverse for that – it’s a long way from cross-dressing cabaret shows to kids’ TV. And nor is this book a hunt for the one uniquely New Zealand style of humour. That hunt leads quickly to so many contradictions that we have followed John Clarke’s firm dictum that there is no such thing as a distinct New Zealand sense of humour. Comedy is not sociology or history or cultural identity. It is comedy. Nevertheless, as Billy T. James’s joke makes clear, the story of New Zealand comedy is also a story of our life and culture in this country.

A send-up of a ‘Lands for Bags’ TV ad was Billy T. James’s most notorious joke.

Our definition of comedy may be broader than other people’s. As readers would expect, we look at performers who proudly call themselves comedians and shows that are labelled sitcoms. We explain the creation of important New Zealand characters, from Fred Dagg and Lyn of Tawa to Flight of the Conchords. But we are also interested in people who have used comedy to get across what they wanted to say. Cabaret performers, playwrights, and even politicians knew that using humour was an effective way to make an impact. David Lange’s quip about smelling uranium on Jerry Falwell’s breath secured his place in history. New Zealanders remember and treasure that joke, rather than the more pure rhetoric of the rest of the speech. Comedy tells us what we take aim at, as well as what we laugh at.

This book draws on over a hundred interviews recorded for the major TV documentary series that it accompanies. The focus is on performers and writers rather than producers and gatekeepers because we were keen to capture the views of those who worked closely with the audience. Comedy has a direct relationship with its audience that is unique among the performing arts. It lacks institutions that might try to define how comedy should be done – there are no comedy universities. And very little live comedy is subsidised by government arts funding bodies. The audience that has paid good money for an entertaining night out does not congratulate the performer or writer for something that failed to make them laugh. In this respect, the contract between the comedian and the audience is radically different to that of theatre. Comedy has to be responsive to the shifting cultural and economic whims of the people who are watching. That relationship between comedians and their audience is at the heart of this book.

We have kept our focus mainly on people working in New Zealand. Many New Zealanders have worked successfully overseas without necessarily being influential back home. Even John Clarke’s best Clarke and Dawe sketches, famous in Australia, were seldom broadcast in New Zealand.

This is not a complete history and we have not tried to pull all the threads together to create a comedy canon. Instead, this is a book about parallel New Zealand histories that sometimes connect and overlap. We feel like we have heard a hundred asides rather than one single story. While we have had generous help from many of the great institutions that look after New Zealand cultural history, the preservation of comedy traditions is a relatively new priority for them, so we have encountered huge gaps. Some of these gaps may never be filled, but in identifying the gaps we have helped to at least define the terrain. There is much work to be done on such ephemera as the end-of-year skit performance and the community sketch comedy show. These are comedy traditions that have had much wider participation than professional comedy but have barely been touched by scholars.

There are other frustrating gaps. So much of the vaudeville tradition, where comedy flourished in the first third of the twentieth century, left behind almost no records at all. Here is the vaudevillian Sylvia Rielly (née Poynter) describing a performer at Fullers theatre in Auckland in the 1920s.

Another wonderful person I never forgot was Mrs Clark, a twenty stone buddle [sic] of hilarity – to audiences and to herself. A lady trying to make a few extra bob to support her family…. She was such a draw card that the managers would pay her to go on the bill. A gallant old girl scrubbing floors and washing clothes – performing in the evenings to bring home enough to feed her kids.

We would have loved to tell more about the Mrs Clarks but often all that remained was a scrap of information like this. There are many more stories to be discovered, and many of them will be funny as. But we hope that this story of New Zealand comedy is a start.

Bloody laughter

WAR AND THE BIRTH OF NEW ZEALAND COMEDY

Fuck ’em all, Fuck ’em all!

The long and the short and the tall,

Fuck all the sergeants and W.O.1s,

Fuck all the corporals and their fucking sons;

For we’re saying goodbye to them all,

As up the C.O.’s arse they crawl,

You’ll get no promotion

This side of the ocean,

So cheer up my lads

Fuck ’em all!

– World War I song¹

It is impossible to pinpoint an exact moment when a New Zealand sense of humour emerged as independent of British or Australian humour. But the joyful irreverence and goading defiance of this song, collected by Les Cleveland for his brilliant book Dark Laughter, suggest that just as a distinct national identity is often assumed to have been formed during and after the bloodbath of World War I, so a New Zealand sense of what comedy does and how it works took shape around the same time. The comedy that developed was often anti-authoritarian – the ‘fuck ’em all’ directed at the army’s officers in this case – as well as expressing a determination to have a good time even when things were looking grim.

World War I also shaped the structures of New Zealand comedy performance. Entertaining the troops depended on small groups that were portable and versatile. Performers needed to be able to sing, do monologues or small dramatic pieces and dance reasonably well on usually outdoor, improvised stages. Such self-reliant, multitalented small groups became a template for New Zealand comedy performance over the following hundred years. World War I even gave New Zealand its first comedy superstar in Pat Hanna. A Wellington signwriter and amateur performer, Hanna, born as George Patrick Hanna in Whitianga in 1888, came out of the war as a fully fledged comedy impresario.

The Digger Pierrots

One of the most important of the wartime groups was the Digger Pierrots, formed on the Western Front in 1917. Pierrot costumes were a common uniform that did not denote they were commedia dell’arte or even clowns; rather they were a troupe uniform popular with group acts, rather than individual music-hall or vaudeville performers. The group performed stripped-down, escapist entertainment described in publicity as ‘Rollicking Foolery, odd nonsense and novel interludes’. The Digger Pierrots’ shows also played with the meanings of manhood and womanhood. As a male troupe performing for a male audience, female impersonators were central to the entertainment. Meanwhile, Hanna began to develop his character Chic, the classic ordinary bloke who will do anything to get out of fighting or indeed any work at all. This rebellious, anti-army sentiment proved hugely popular and Chic became one of the few elements that the constantly innovating Hanna kept in his act.

Hanna joined the Digger Pierrots near the end of the war and a rapid series of name changes followed: they were the Famous Digger Pierrots or just the Famous Diggers. They re-formed in New Zealand after armistice to do a fundraising tour, before Hanna took full control of the group in 1920 when they settled into their final and most famous incarnation, Pat Hanna’s Diggers. They toured constantly throughout New Zealand and Australia over the following decade. As the war became a memory, Hanna started to change both the line-ups and material. He added women performers, one of whom he married, and incorporated longer and more complex pieces of comic drama into the three-hour shows. Although he moved away from military material, he would always finish the show with a short, military-themed sketch. But without the simplistic demands of the men at the front, his material grew increasingly sophisticated.

Australian theatre academic Richard Fotheringham regarded some of this later material as very early, popular modernist theatre: ‘Many of the dramatized sketches performed by Hanna’s company … were structured around a contrast between events as they occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream.’²

Poster for the Digger Pierrots’ tour of Australia, Adelaide, 1920.

The Digger Pierrots at Nieppe, France, on the Western Front, 15 August 1917.

Outdoor performance at the Western Front, 1918.

At the end of the 1920s, Hanna sensed the rise of the movie industry and decided it was where his future lay. Diggers (1931) was the second ‘talkie’ made in Australia and is full of material from his live shows, including scenes featuring Chic. It was followed by Diggers in Blighty and Waltzing Matilda (both 1933). The films were not widely seen but the irrepressible Hanna toured the USA in 1934 to promote them, billing himself as the ‘Down Under Will Rogers’. By this stage he had become thoroughly Australasian for publicity purposes. When he recorded his sketches, he scored a huge hit with ‘The Gospel According to Cricket’, a monologue involving a vicar intoning about the Ashes tours: ‘They shall be slow in the field as a nail that is smitten with the rheumatism and they handle a cricket bat as an old lady with a frying pan.’

A promotional postcard for The Diggers designed by Pat Hanna, c. 1920.

By 1939 Hanna, who was never the greatest of business minds, had turned his back on show business to earn money as an inventor. One of his ideas was the game batinton, promoted as a more ‘flexible’ version of badminton. Batinton did not take off, although an igniter for petrol grenades proved to be more successful. Hanna died in England in 1973.

The New Zealand unofficial cartoonist, Lieutenant Pat Hanna, captions his cartoon ‘Hindenbeggar’, drawn on the wall of the officers’ club. It shows a caricatured head of the German General von Hindenburg. Photograph taken 1 July 1917 by Henry Armytage Sanders.

Noel Ross: ‘akin to genius’

Noel Ross, 1890–1917.

World War I turned the world upside down but for many New Zealanders it provided opportunities they would otherwise only have dreamed of. Dunedin-born journalist Noel Ross was wounded at Gallipoli fighting with the Canterbury Infantry Battalion. While recuperating in England he became a regular contributor to The Times after his father Malcolm Ross, the war correspondent for the Otago Daily Times, pulled a few strings. Known for his charming comedic touch, the younger Ross rapidly became a favourite with the editor of The Times. He was known for finding real, comedic moments in amongst what might have been grim scenes. He recalls, having been wounded at Gallipoli, waking up in a Cairo field hospital in the short story ‘Abdul: an appreciation’. Here the hospital orderly jolts him awake giving his pale Otago physique an overly vigorous bed-bath because ‘I had been wearing shorts at Anzac [Cove] and Abdul was trying to wash the sunburn off my knees’.³

With his constitution weakened by his war wounds, Ross died in London in 1917 of typhoid fever, aged twenty-seven. He had been writing for barely a year. Telegrams from King George V and Rudyard Kipling were read out at his funeral. Lord Northcliffe, publisher of The Times, sent a message to his staff that said, ‘We have had a very severe blow in the death of dear Noel Ross, who was akin to genius’.⁴ His main work House-Party Manual was published posthumously and well received. It now reads as an admirable attempt at P. G. Wodehouse-style writing that has moments of quite acerbic, polite outsider comedy. War gave Ross a chance and for a short time he developed an ardent following.