The Classic
Review: Greg Dixon
That's nifty: a comedian with the theme of his new show tattooed on his arm.
"New Zealand," shouts the one Mike King flaunts on his arm -- and so too does his first solo show, a performance which could be subtitled "A Comic's Search for the Land of the Long Loud Laugh."
Our nation's history is King's country, and in a little over an hour his clever comic eye surveys some of its most vexing terrain: our patchy racial relations, past and present.
With sidekick and director Radar (a shorter Eric Morecambe minus the neck slapping) providing props and amateur dramatics, King talks his audience through the arrival of Maori and Europeans, our wars, the "mixed marriage" that is the treaty and why we should feel damned proud despite the marital bickering.
But while King's version of history has at times a little too much of the lecture about it, he's no James Belich (there's not a lot of wild gesticulation for a start) and he knows it.
Instead, King shrewdly plays on ignorance as well as knowledge, sparring with Radar to mine laughs from white and brown naivete of their shared history.
King builds his central thesis from his son's obsession with African American rap culture towards a central story from the New Zealand wars, the battle of Te Ngutu o te Manu and its heroes, Gustavus Von Tempsky, Thomas McDonnell and the one-eyed Titokowaru.
But King's country doesn't quite turn out to be the Land of the Long Loud Laugh. That's the trouble with history -- it can seem a long time between gags. There is simply no way to tell a long, reasonably complex story and still have punters laughing at every full stop.
But what Welcome To King Country is -- and this sounds rather incongruous in a comedy review -- is brave. Few comedians would dare to seek hee-haws from history.
King does, and while he wins many battles for belly laughs, in the end he doesn't quite succeed in becoming Kiingi of all he surveys.