The cast of Funny Girls, including Rose Matafeo, Kim Crossman, Laura Daniel. Photo / Supplied TV3
The cast of Funny Girls, including Rose Matafeo, Kim Crossman, Laura Daniel. Photo / Supplied TV3
Duncan Greive heads behind-the-scenes to check out TV3's newest comedy offering, Funny Girls.
It's Wednesday, late afternoon. Outside, commuter traffic crawls along Khyber Pass; one side flowing north to the Southern Motorway, the other south toward Remuera and the Eastern Suburbs. A few metres away, the club is pumping.
Rose Matafeo and Chelsea Millar are in the middle of Lucha Lounge, a cramped,dingy respite from Newmarket's vapid commercial heart.
Normally it's covered in Mexican memorabilia but today its walls are bare while it stands in for a generic city nightclub.
"Here's to 10 years since high school," says Millar, yelling over a fake rap song. "And still best friends.""Selfie!" yells Matafeo, and they lean in to capture the moment.
As the flash goes off, Laura Daniel appears behind them, fake wine sloshing out of her fake glass, yelling "Heeeeeeey Bitch!", her voice scything through the air like fork pressed too hard on a plate.
The trio hold their faces for a moment - Daniel leering, Matafeo and Millar disgusted - before director Johnny Barker, a decade on from his turn as Shortland Street serial killer, yells cut. The club relaxes.
They'll run through the moment upwards of a dozen times before we're done. It gets better each time, in small ways and large. Matafeo asks if she should take her boots off to get her down on Millar and Daniel's level; Barkers agrees.
More importantly, Daniel is growing increasingly unhinged, and starts riffing boozy late-night dialogue. "'Sup sluts! Let's go get shots," she says, winningly, and by the end it's accompanied by fingers at a vee over her mouth, the cheery universal signal for cunnilingus.
The scene is crackling by the end, and even the extras, initially reticent, have begun to flirt a little: "You're a student," says a gangly man to a young woman in a satin dress, "what are you studying?" The fake club has become indistinguishable from a real one.
This process, creating a convincing scenario out of thin air, often for a single scene or joke, has been happening all over Auckland these past few months, as TV3's brand new sketch comedy Funny Girls has come to life, the bulk of it in a few frantic weeks.
The hours were long and the process unnerving, but for a whole generation of young female comedy writers and performers, the show represented the most exciting and energising professional opportunity of their lives to this point.
"It was incredibly freeing, in that we could write about whatever we wanted," says Matafeo, "but challenging for the same reason. As in, we can write whatever we want? That's too much freedom!"
The core of the Funny Girls writing and performing crew came out of Snort, a long-running improv group who perform late on Fridays at The Basement Theatre off Queen St.
Rose Matafeo, one of the stars of TV3's new comedy Funny Girls.
It has become something of a cult, for both its audience - it sells out every week - and the performers, for whom it functions as a second family. There's a private Facebook group with a group message which has run for just under two years, and as we went to print ran to 66,290 responses.
"It can never be shared," says Joseph Moore, one of the show's few male writers. "We joke often, in the thread, about how many of us will lose our jobs if it's ever shared."
Along with Snort, the show's key staff have deep connections to Jono and Ben, a blokey show which also functions as a development machine for TV3.
The three key drivers of the show are Jono and Ben producer Bronwynn Bakker, along with Matafeo, a former writer and performer and Daniel, who has recently joined the cast.
It's a paradox of Jono and Ben that much of its financial viability comes through its connection to MediaWorks financial juggernaut The Rock FM, a boorish male-dominated station, but that it has now birthed this show, a vision of female-driven comedy in a field in which they're often consigned to a slightly token role.
That has extended to actors known more for drama than comedy, with Antonia Prebble, Teuila Blakely and Kimberly Crossman all making multiple appearances, and leveraging it to develop their own comedic talents along the way.
"What's cool about this," says Crossman, "is it starts as a script and then you get on set and everyone's got their own layers that they add to it.
"Johnny [Barker] doesn't call cut, and we get to go for five or 10 minutes after the scene's finished and just improvise."
The number of tensions on the show - dramatic and comedic acting, improvisational and written comedy, fresh talent with real control - helps make it one of the most intriguing experiments our television industry has produced in years, one which might echo for years to come.
"It's incredible to see a group of young and incredibly talented writers and performers take the helm of a show, and be allowed to do that," says Matafeo, sounding slightly dazed that it even happened.
