By FRANCIS TILL
All the lights are lit on Comedy Lane for the TV2 International Laugh! Festival, with multiple venues just a short walk from one another in the CBD.
Starting at the K-Rd intersection with Queen St, the Covert Theatre offers a full Saturday night plate that opens at 7 with Micetro, an improv contest featuring novice comics coming out of the Covert's unique training programme.
Assigned roles and potentially impossible tasks by the audience and the director, the lucky few (five on Saturday) on stage are rated by audience response in a series of quick, tight skits that leave the victor with the magic mouse and the title, "Micetro".
The show is family-friendly, but doesn't suffer for that - the performers are a high-yield crop of new Kiwi talent and the venue is inviting.
Stick around for the award-winning Improv Bandits after, or head downhill to the Classic on Queen St, now a stylish and up-market all-comedy venue. The Classic features two of the best stand-up acts in the festival, Ross Noble from Britain and Andrew Maxwell of Ireland.
Noble invents his performance as he goes along, taking impromptu cues from the audience and the day. He loves hecklers and invites them to chime in but lets the audience do the heavy work of shutting up scoundrels.
This is highly interactive comedy, drawn from the moment, with smatterings of polished parody that would have earned him a place in the original Python crew.
Maxwell follows Noble and delivers an edgier, satirical humour that suffers a bit in comparison - he bites back at hecklers with panache, but the audience rapport is slower to form.
Much of what he has to deliver is inventory rather than spontaneous invention, but it's localised inventory and his dissection of Helen Clark's visage had the audience rolling in spite of itself.
Then, a bit further down Queen St at the Underground beneath the Civic, there's Janey Godley, a late-night show from Scotland.
Godley is the perfect nightcap - her dry wit and exquisite sense of irony are like a fine cognac after a full meal. She takes on class structure, self-important teachers and mad women of a certain age with a casual but focused delivery that demands intelligence from her audience - and rewards it well.
International Laugh! Festival
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