Cori's comedy coup

The winner of the Billy T James award had audiences rolling in the aisles by telling them to 'shut up'.

Guy walks into a bar. Seriously. A young guy, with an uncanny resemblance to King Kong's Adrian Brodie, walks into a bar and grabs a microphone.

"Shut up," he says and the audience falls apart laughing. Cori Gonzales-Macuer's first attempt at standup and all it took were those two words to get them rolling in the aisles.

And there his audience has stayed, for the past three years, rolling with laughter through sellout shows and rave reviews till last week, when the 24-year-old was crowned New Zealand's funniest comedian.

Gonzales is the youngest winner of the prestigious Billy T James award. It's an enormous coup, guaranteeing him right of passage into comedy clubs worldwide. And it's no mean feat for a Chilean immigrant too young to remember the late James, other than in some hazy television images and a language he didn't yet understand.

They call him the future of New Zealand comedy. They also call him Adrian Brodie's back. And strangely, or typically if you believe we are overly obsessed with Peter Jackson movies, it's the latter that gets him the most attention. Gonzales-Macuer's back, hands and other bits took an anonymous starring role in King Kong - as Brodie's body double.

Knowing that, it is not hard to spot the dark-haired, lanky guy walking down the street towards the San Francisco Bathhouse - Wellington's home of comedy.

The resemblance to Kong's nemesis is striking. Of course there are some differences. "I'm half a centimetre taller," he offers. But the eyebrows really set them apart. Brodie's rise and fall in that typically theatrical way. Gonzales-Macuer's are finely tuned tools of deadpan glued, like rigid black possum tails, to his forehead.

"I hate it in a way," he says of the fuss over his role in Kong. "I don't think it's a big deal really. Nobody in America is going to go: 'Who's that? It doesn't look like Adrian Brodie's back, I wonder whose back that is'."

Nevertheless those who know him watch the film, especially the scenes where Brodie's character runs away from Kong, more closely than most.

"The first time I saw it I was in Chile and was with my family. My aunty, she picked it up straight away. I turn around in the theatre and she's like in tears, holding her face."

And they are not the only tears his proud family have shed for him. Especially last week when he was announced winner of the Billy T award at the Oddfellows NZ International Comedy Festival in Auckland. His mother's plane from Wellington had been cancelled, but he was on the phone to his parents before he even left the stage. He was crying, they were crying. "Yeah, it was pretty cool."

Pretty cool indeed. Previous winners of the Billy T include comedic legends Brendhan Lovegrove, Ben Hurley, Ewen Gilmour, Te Radar and Taika Cohen.

Next month he leaves for Britain where he already has gigs booked in London and Edinburgh - the smallest of which pays more than he's ever earned as a comedian here.

He has a movie coming out - a support role in Taika Waititi's first feature film, which continues a run of appearances in local films and TV shows, including the acclaimed Insiders Guide to Happiness. And if that wasn't enough he has just been crowned Cleo magazine's Flavour of the Month - something he says he doesn't often bring up (contrary to what I found on his website where it is shamelessly promoted).

He left Chile 18 years ago, escaping Pinochet's regime with his mother and father, whose politics were too left to live with the dictator. They settled, with his little brother, in Wellington.

Born Enrice, he was nicknamed Cori after a popular brand of Chilean cough mixture he developed a fancy for as a baby. "It was my first word," he says. "It was called coridon or something, and I used to shout 'cori, cori, cori' till everyone started calling me Cori."

The eyebrows remain motionless.

He had the beginnings of a promising career as a soccer player, representing Wellington before heading to Chile to play semi-professionally.

Osteoporosis put a stop to soccer and he came back here to study theatre four years ago, dropping out, to his parent's dismay, the night he told the audience to shut up.

"Listen mate, you've got to keep doing this," said then convenor of Wellington comedy, Ben Hurley, when his soon-to-be protege got off the stage.

Now Gonzales-Macuer runs the Wellington comedy scene, booking the gigs at the Bathhouse, while running comedy website www.rhinoradar.co.nz

The Bathhouse is inhabited by younger student types. It is loose, fresh, anarchic, and just a little disorganised.

I meet Gonzales-Macuer there one night, supposedly for a night of comedy but the show has been cancelled. Only five paying customers have turned up. His first show after winning the Billy T and someone forgot to advertise it.

Instead, he proceeds to drink beer, as do the other acts, and the microphone comes out for the comics to "roast" Rowan the barman, who is fast regretting his last night on the job.

I hear more about Rowan than is conducive to a good night's sleep. He has phlegm issues, apparently. The whole experience is like a flashback to the days of flatmates, curtains that stay closed all day, and paua shells stuffed with a million Rothmans butts which litter the floor.

New Zealand's funniest comedian is indeed very young. He is also very dedicated to growing New Zealand comedy.

Thus, he reckons, he is quite happy to bear the mantle of "the future of New Zealand comedy". "Not that I'm being arrogant, but it's kind of good that people expect me to do something with it because I really want to."

First on his hit list would be TVNZ. The broadcaster's only real comedy show, the political satire Facelift, is "bullshit," he reckons, "the worst show in the world". And Tony Holden, TVNZ's head of commissioning "hates comedy and hates comedians". (To be fair, Holden turned down a show proposal from Gonzales-Macuer.)

"Comedians should write comedy shows. At the moment they just have writers writing stuff like Facelift and crap like that, which is just horrible. Comedians watch it and want to kill themselves because it's just so bad."

Not that he doesn't make mistakes. Like calling his show last year, I Love David Hasslehoff. Just a funny name, he thought. "I wasn't going to do anything about him. Then it was sold out and I was like: 'People are probably going to want to hear about David Hasslehoff'. It kind of didn't really let me do much proper standup."

His latest show, to avoid any confusion, is called, The Never Ending Cori. Next month he takes aspects of it to Britain. First stop, Edinburgh. He's sick with nerves. But that's nothing compared to the nerves he had in small-town New Zealand.

"They're horrible," he confesses of gigs in provincial towns. "I'm not that kind of comedian. I'm kind of quiet. People in Masterton just want to hear what their girlfriend does to them, and how they got wasted and passed out or that Helen Clark looks like a man. Things like that. Redneck jokes.

"It's little gigs ... random small pubs in small towns where people don't know a thing about comedy and if you don't say the right thing they actually will stab you afterwards."

So how did he survive?

"I think I might have had a few drinks. I was a bit loose and I got up and, yeah, I might actually have done a joke about how Helen Clark looks like a man."

Sometimes even for New Zealand's funniest man, there are times when the best "shut up" joke just doesn't cut it.