It's 31 years since comedian Raybon Kan did his first stand-up show.
The original ‘Asian at My Table’ on his solid gold anniversary tour.
It’s a year ago. Mike Tyson is on Netflix about to fight a YouTuber.
I expect Tyson to win. Not because he’s a paragon – au contraire – but because it doesn’t compute that an actual boxing champion could lose at boxing to a YouTuber, no matter the age difference.
How’s the YouTuber gonna hurt Tyson? An emoji in the comments?
It’s like Elton John. No matter how gnarled or arthritic his fingers become, give Elton John a keyboard and he’s painting emotions. But someone who picked it up later in life? They’re typing the piano like Woody Woodpecker, while calling out notes. It’s no contest. Surely.
Pre-fight, the announcers discuss whether Tyson can be competitive at 58 against a 27-year-old. Competitive? He’s gonna kill him!
Wait a minute, Tyson’s kinda my age? Quick google. He’s a few months older but he started his trade younger – much younger – and a lot of his job involves being punched in the head. By heavyweight boxers. So he’s carrying some mileage, but I still believe in him.
After all, in a kung-fu film, who’s the deadliest? Not the obvious guy with muscles. The small guy. And who’s deadlier than the small guy? The small, old, blind guy. (Although, old plus blind probably goes beyond mileage to more like voiding the warranty.)
My predictions, and Tyson, do not fare well. He’s out of gas within one round, and his opponent visibly stops trying before the end. Is there a moral here – the tortoise and the hare, but a dismal version, told by an actuary?
Then it dawns on me. It’s been 30 years since I first started stand-up. Like exactly 30. And while it’s not like me to look on the bright side, I notice something good about this. I’m not a boxer!
Unlike Mike Tyson, I’m fitter than I was when I started. (That’s difficult for him, not difficult for me.) And unlike Elton John, I can still hit exactly as many high notes as I could before. There’s a reason this sounds like a disclaimer. I’m back, baby!
Brief training montage. Me, looking at bits of paper. Discarding most. A bin fills. I stand at the top of a staircase, fists raised. The show will be my favourite bits, but nothing that’s been on TV.
Fast forward a year. No longer my 30th anniversary. It’s now the 31st. A tour takes time to schedule. But in its own way, 31 is also a round number, if you don’t understand numbers or shapes.
The first year I did stand-up, there was no comedy club in New Zealand. We had to make our own fun.
And while I want to emphasise the show isn’t just me ranting ‘In my day,’ over and over, while pointing everywhere – as I write this piece, I can’t help reflecting.
It was a different time. Road cones knew their place. Road cones were content to be punctuation – a comma here, a raised eyebrow there – not a verbose manifesto written on every lane using a font called All Caps Road Cones.
Words had different meanings. Grooming was something to be proud of. Men were encouraged to work on their grooming. Nowadays, grooming gets you sent to a different parish. Uh, eventually.
Air was cleaner in the 90s. We just breathed it. We didn’t use it to fry food.
And – go figure – the first year I did stand-up was also the first year I wrote an email. Or as we called it, an E-Mail. “It’s like sending faxes for free,” someone explained to me. “International.”
Whoa. As a typical 1990s fax machine owner with plural friends overseas, the mind boggled.
You might think, big deal: in 2025, the mind boggles every time you scroll. But this was 1994. In 1994, if the mind boggled, it boggled unanimously.
Nowadays, the mind boggles like MMP. A coalition of contradictions pretend to be on the same page, but their attention has the focus of a dandelion. In 1994, mind-boggling was tantric.
As the world was going digital – as mail was going electronic – I was taking my first steps into an art form that surely pre-dated cave painting.
Talking. That was it. Monologue, analogue.
“School was easy. Everyone assumed I was good at maths. They gave me the accounting prize — I didn’t even take the subject.”
The impact of 9/11: “They took my nail clippers. If you can hijack a plane – with nail clippers – you deserve the plane.”
Conspiracies: “Did you know if you rearrange the letters in Princess Diana, it spells ‘PS dies in a car’? Actually, it doesn’t, it’s out by a letter, but it’s close.”
I discovered audiences don’t carry a pad and pen to audit your anagrams. You could say anything.
I couldn’t be more excited.