KEY POINTS:
It's an old line, but still true, that trying to make an audience laugh isn't always fun. There's a microphone, jokes, the spotlight and that's it. Drawing quietly rapt attention means utter failure.
It's no surprise that stand-up comedy easily tops any list of show business' toughest callings.
It gets worse. This trade can only be learned in public.
Humiliation lurks every time a comedian steps from the wings. No one is ever completely safe. This writer once suffered for Robin Williams going pale with terror in a Los Angeles club as his jokes bounced silently off the walls.
Judging by AotearoHA (TV3, 8.30pm tonight), New Zealand has performers reducing the odds of this happening to the same as anywhere else, meaning they are good at what they do.
What is helping is local comedy finally moving on from trying to shock with language long passe in any workplace, sports ground or playground, combined with the trawl - usually futile - for something new in sex.
Richer material is available and it has made lucrative careers for comedians around the globe. Find what is close and milk it. AotearoHa's comedians come from Maori and Pacific Island communities, enthusiastically mining life in a demographic struggling to get up the ladder.
The impact of poverty on housing and education gets detailed attention, on the way to the home of the best comedy, when laughter is easily spun around to become sharp and painful drama.
South Auckland, sometimes bleak and newsworthy for all the wrong reasons, is thoroughly sifted for jokes. Fortunately, the mayor and council needn't feel their community is too ruthlessly targeted. Birkenhead and Kaitaia also feel the sting.
With political correctness largely keeping Europeans out of Maori and Pacific Island issues there is a vacuum, one these folk have sprinted to fill. Irene Pink's wicked response to an English woman doctor's question about Polynesians and heroin addiction is something only she, or someone exactly like her, would dare attempt.
The relationship between the races is also fodder, with Andre King's two zipping lines about Muslims and Indians gems no European would contemplate trying. Ben Hurley shares an edgy plan for his portion of a successful land claim.
Vela Manusaute wades straight into Polynesian life with a long and risky list of what his family and friends laugh at.
Fig Jam explains why Once Were Warriors' Jake the Muss wouldn't be a factor in the Far North.
Gish emerges from behind his hair to do impersonations of Dave Dobbyn and the Eagles. Listening carefully brings a reward. In the best sequence, Bundy offers a sly linking of pretentious art interpretation with Maori reality.
In the end, these comedians are correspondents sending back bulletins from a world most of us don't inhabit and too many of us don't know. We should be listening.
This is our Auckland and, on this showing, there's something we've been missing. It has a dimension no one else has told us about. There's a deep, rich humour out there.
