NZ Comedy Fest turns old uni lecture notes into gold – Amy Mansfield

Mika Austin plays eight different university lecturers in Amy Mansfield's verbatim show at the NZ International Comedy Festival.

Amy Mansfield spent hundreds of hours in lecture theatres collecting thousands of words of wisdom during her seven years at Auckland University. In her comedy show, I Didn’t Invite You Here to Lecture Me, she tries to make some sense of them.

I’ve long been interested in fragments, scraps, the things other people throw away. This applies to words, too. For 25 years, I held on to my uni notes because I knew they contained hundreds of gems.

This is the constant recycling and upcycling that goes on in the creative world — how we make something from “nothing”. Monet took a thousand moments of light. MacGyver took rubber bands and bits of grit from the bottom of his jeans pocket.

I took 1000 throwaway lines by lecturers, collected during my seven years at the University of Auckland studying law and arts, and turned them into a verbatim comedy about nothing less than the nature of being.

These lines were off-script, unguarded and always made the lecture, no matter what it was about, come alive.

A lecturer would say something like, “What’s your name? Francoise! I like the name Francoise. If I’d have been a girl, I’d have liked to have been a Francoise ...” And suddenly we didn’t care about promissory estoppel or the Treaty of Versailles, but what it might be like to be someone else altogether.

For a long time, I was merely a note-taker. I didn’t know what I was going to do with all these moments I was recording at the bottom of my pad of lined refill. I didn’t know what, if any, connection there was between them. I didn’t realise I was playing the long game.

Writer Amy Mansfield takes you back to the classroom for a "quick-fire education guaranteed to get you a degree in 55 minutes".

I Didn’t Invite You Here to Lecture Me is set in a lecture theatre with comic actor Mika Austin playing eight different characters, all lecturers in (respectively) literature, linguistics, law, policy, German and music.

Mika and I have been clowning around for decades, first in the form of earnest performance poetry as undergrads and, soon after, in plays performed entirely in German (a language I don’t really speak).

She played a toddler in a 10-minute piece I wrote about “endurance parenting”. Last year, she was a chief executive called “Dick” in our show HR The Musical, a satirical take on corporate office culture.

I Didn’t Invite You Here to Lecture Me is about language — at the macro level, of power relations built into our laws and our grammar (activists: unite), and, at the micro level, of vowels, consonants and stress in the English language (linguist geeks: unite).

Heavy stuff for comedy, you might think, but also outrageously funny.

Initially, it was staged in neighbourhood living rooms around Auckland where Mika and I would create a pop-up theatre for the night.

We’ve since toured the show nationally and to Melbourne, including performances in actual lecture theatres at the Universities of Auckland and Otago, as well as more obscure locations, including a church, a reclaimed warehouse and above a schnitzel shop.

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I’m not a scientist, but even before the first performance, the lines had already been tested in the laboratory that was the large lecture theatre.

With so many students now “attending” lectures remotely, I guess that couldn’t happen as easily these days. Emojis are fine, sure. The sound of an entire room laughing together is much more human.

Enrolling in a degree is a bit like getting an annual subscription to a very weird kind of theatre. Every lecture, every class is different, and the differences are in the in-between moments when the lecturer suddenly reveals something about their mental state of mind: “Extraordinary decision, isn’t it? To erase oneself…”

Or they state they prefer the Socratic method and ask a question, and everyone thinks, “Oh, no. Don’t call on me. I didn’t come here to become a revolutionary”.

Sometimes, what you thought you were there for and what you actually were there for turned out to be quite different things.

When I did a giant edit of my education via my uni notes, it came down to three small, hard-working verbs: to be, to do, to become. The informal, in-between lines I’d recorded offered up these questions:

How do we make and break identities, individual or collective? How do we understand what we’ve done or what we are doing? How do we instigate or influence change?

I’ve recently returned from travelling in the northern hemisphere, and there’s nothing like standing in a holding pen before a ride at a theme park or in a queue at immigration to make you think twice about when to time your own revolutionary moments.

At moments like that, I remembered this line from my notes and from the show: “I don’t think you need to have studied German history from 1933-45 to know that, sometimes, you shouldn’t go with the flow.”

•  I Didn’t Invite You Here to Lecture Me, directed by Michael Hurst, is on at the NZ International Comedy Festival in Wellington May 6-8; Auckland May 21-24 and Christchurch May 29, see comedyfestival.co.nz