Matt Heath at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival’s Great Debate. Photo / Jason Oxenham
The Hauraki breakfast host and self-proclaimed bumbling idiot has written a self-help book, called A Life Less Punishing: 13 Ways To Love the Life You’ve Got.
Greg Bruce spent a day with him, to find out if he’s been drinking his own medicine.
On Friday May 17, at The New Zealand International Comedy Festival’s Great Debate at SkyCity Theatre, Matt Heath’s team captain Josh Thomson introduced him to the crowd thus: “He’s a movie star, TV star, rock and roll star. He’s also just written a book about self-help. Maybe a step too far?”
Thomson then turned to Heath and said: “You writing a book about self-help is like me writing a book about how to avoid buffets”.
The crowd really enjoyed that.
This roasting was typical of how the night went for Heath. It was not surprising.
This is a man who has built a career out of breaching social norms and embarrassing people, including himself; a man who achieved notoriety by asking many famous people – including Paul McCartney and then-Prime Minister John Key – whether they trim their pubic hair, have ever sent a dick pic or have masturbated (“fed the chickens”) in the past month.
He acknowledges in the book what an unlikely self-help author he is, quoting one friend who, on finding out about it, said: “But you’re crazy”, and another who said: “You don’t know s*** and you can’t spell”. He says both are fair criticisms.
Thomson concluded his introduction of Heath at the debate by saying: “All in all, he’s an awful human being”.
How is it that a man so obviously unqualified to write a self-help book has come to write what he describes as “a self-help book in its purest form”?
The day of the comedy debate had started, as usual, at 6am, with Heath in the Radio Hauraki studio for the daily radio show he hosts with friend and colleague Jeremy Wells.
He was in a bit of a tizz about the debate, because he hadn’t written his speech, despite having had weeks to do it, and having spent most of the week talking about it.
“Jesus,” he said at one point.
“I don’t know what I’m going to say for six minutes of comedy tonight.”
On air a few minutes later, his co-host and friend Jeremy Wells said: “I’ve got a request of you, please. Could you please stop writing your debate speech for tonight? Just do the radio show now and later on write your six-minute argument. That’d be great”.
“No,” Heath replied. “I don’t have time later. I’ve got to do it now. I’m going to the gym later. I figure I’ll simultaneously write my debate here. Radio’s mainly just listening to songs isn’t it?”
Not long after that, the Prime Minister walked into the Hauraki office and started glad-handing staff. Heath noticed him through the studio window:
“I’ve just seen the Prime Minister pesting around in that room out there,” he said to Wells, on air.
“What’s he doing?” Wells asked, laughing.
“He’s just sort of having a sniff round,” Heath said, laughing.
Prime Ministers, including the current one, have been regular visitors to the Matt and Jerry show for many years, despite the inevitable embarrassing innuendo and questions about pubes, sexual conduct and public sector firings.
When the Prime Minister was allowed to enter the studio, he was friendly and familiar:
“How are you, Matt?” he said. “How’s the book selling?”
“Not quite out yet,” Heath replied. “Have you pre-ordered?”
The PM said no, not once, not twice, but seven times, in extremely quick succession, as if he couldn’t put enough distance between the book and himself.
“It’s available for pre-order now,” Heath said.
The Prime Minister changed the subject.
On air a couple of minutes later, the Prime Minister said: “I hear you’ve got a great book coming out. I want to know, of those 13 bits of advice, which I thought was a very good title, what would be the piece that would be most relevant to give to me?”
Heath replied: “I would say it would be around stress, and when you’re getting really, really stressed, just go ‘How am I right now?’ Because something full-on might be happening in an hour, it might be happening tomorrow, but you just ask: ‘Am I alright now? I’m sitting on a chair in the Matt and Jerry Breakfast Show. Things are ok right now”.
He continued: “The brain can only handle so many things at once, right? But the brain loves a win, so if you feel like you’re stressed, go and make some people some coffee and come back and then de-stress.”
The Prime Minister said: “I like that. I’m going to bring that into cabinet”.
Later, Heath asked the Prime Minister if he sleeps in the nude.
The Prime Minister said he wears boxers. He asked the Prime Minister if he was planning to give the police guns. The Prime Minister said he wasn’t.
The Prime Minister said he was planning to “grow the joint”. Heath asked if what he’d said was “grow the joints”. The Prime Minister said no, he’d said “grow the joint”.
After his radio show finished at 9am, he recorded two podcasts: The Daily Bespoke for Hauraki and The Agenda for the Hauraki-adjacent Alternative Commentary Collective.
On the Daily Bespoke he and Wells discussed what Wells perceived as the problem with the narrative arc of the protagonist in hit Netflix show Baby Reindeer.
Wells: “Matt, you have written for television before and you understand how a character has to develop through a series, or through a show. So you have to start from low and end up high, or you have to start high and end up low, but you can’t start low and end low”.
Heath: “That’s no arc”.
Wells: “What are the alternatives? Starting high and ending low? Well you wouldn’t want to do that. Also, starting low and ending high, you look like a self-saucing f***wit”.
The Agenda podcast was dominated by the Warriors, Super Rugby and a little bit about golf.
After that, Heath had a casual chat and photo with a group of excited primary school boys who were fans from his appearance on season two of Taskmaster, where he finished second-to-last.
The kids had spotted him while on a tour. He said kids tend to like him on TV because he’s a bumbling idiot.
“Also, there’s lots of dads that follow our [radio] show and follow the things we do and their kid listens in the car and we’re a bit naughty.”
After that, he rode his dad’s e-bike down Victoria Street to the offices of his publisher, Allen and Unwin, where the machinery of Big Publishing was winding into gear in service of his book, for which they have high hopes.
The marketing team had made a list of 15 influential people who would receive signed books, in the hopes they would mention it on social media or at parties or wherever they go to exert influence.
It took Heath roughly half an hour to craft personalised messages for each of them, and to decide which of his signatures would suit them best. He has three: “A casual one, a formal one and a rakish, roguish one”.
When he’d finished, he looked at the pile and said: “Look at all those f***in’ books”.
Those books represented roughly 18 months of his hard work, plus another six months of what he calls “finishing” – editing, legal checks and “my endless changes”.
The book is called A Life Less Punishing: 13 Ways to Love the Life You’re Given and comes with a front cover endorsement from Kieran Read and back cover endorsements from Jeremy Wells and Urzila Carlson.
The book’s inciting incident takes place in 2019, with Heath in crisis, sitting on the edge of Lake Wakatipu, where he has gone to run a marathon with three friends.
Over the preceding few years, his mum has died, his 16-year relationship with the mother of his children has ended, he’s suffered many other unspecified life failures and he’s “let a heavy sadness into my life”.
He writes: “The dark, cold water looks pretty good. Maybe I could just float away”.
Then, he writes, an epiphany. He will consume the content of history’s great thinkers and combine them into a manual he can use to calm himself down whenever he’s feeling angry, stressed, worried or aimless.
He writes: “My mission is now clear: I will read, listen and write my way out of the unshakeable sadness that has descended upon me, as it has on so many others in our little country”.
And just like that, professional idiot Matt Heath was transformed into professional idiot–philosopher Matt Heath.
Soon after that, his long-running column in the NZ Herald became less about jokes and more about the ideas he was learning from history’s great thinkers.
Soon after that he was appointed the newspaper’s Happiness Editor.
Soon after that, gun Allen and Unwin publisher Michelle Hurley was asking him to write a book.
It’s divided into 13 chapters, with titles like Angry, Dissatisfied, Scared, Stressed, Worried, Bored and Aimless, each of which contains advice on how to deal with those feelings.
Much of the advice congeals around the idea of acceptance: Life sometimes sucks, and will not end well, and the most important thing is figuring out how to live with that.
It’s about putting the events of your life in perspective.
He writes: “We mean a lot to our children now, but they will go on without us when we die; sad for a bit then less so, and not long after that we’ll be completely forgotten. Soon after that all humans will be gone, then the Earth, and then the sun”.
Minutes before the comedy debate, at which his team would be affirming the moot “Are humans the best animals?”, Heath was backstage at the SkyCity Theatre, pacing around dressing room six, reading aloud a section of his speech about a cape baboon that had worked as a signalman for the railway in Port Elizabeth, South Africa in the 1880s.
“What is this shit?” he muttered to himself.
He thought he might have written that bit while falling asleep in bed that afternoon.
He frequently takes what he describes as a “midday siesta”, although it’s rare for that siesta to happen in bed.
Typically, it takes place face-down at his desk and only lasts about 15 minutes before someone wakes him.
On stage, the stuff about the baboon killed, and so did the material in which he compared his tongue (favourably) to that of his dog Colin, but he’d written too much, ran over time, got the bell and had to abandon about a third of his argument, about the ways in which giraffes are sex pests.
His team lost a close audience vote, but if he was disappointed, he didn’t show it.
He went out for half a glass of pinot with some friends who’d been at the debate, then rode home on his dad’s e-bike and watched two Planet of the Apes movies with his son.
He’d been up since 4.45am, but had consumed a Monster energy drink about 5pm, and believed that to have been influential in helping him push through until the end of the second movie, sometime about 2am.
It had been a long, hard day, involving a strangely large number of monkeys, but it had ended happily, at home with his family.
The book ends, several years after Heath’s dark night of the soul, with him enjoying a seven-and-a-half-hour lunch with the same three friends who’d been with him at his lowest. While his life hadn’t materially changed, the way he saw it had.
In the epilogue, he writes: “I am with good friends, my children are healthy, and we all have roofs over our heads and more than enough food to eat. It would be silly not to enjoy times like these”.
He’d started low and ended high. It was the perfect narrative arc.
The day after the Comedy Debate, a Saturday, he woke at 7am. He drove his older son to work, then returned home. By 7.30am, he was back on the couch, with his younger son, watching The Planet of the Apes. It never ends.
A Life Less Punishing: 13 Ways To Love the Life You’ve Got (Allen & Unwin, RRP$37.99) is available from Tuesday May 28
'It’s as horrifying as it is destructive.'