She’s one of the funniest people on New Zealand television, but behind the jokes, Karen O’Leary is deadly serious.
Because of her extensive background in education, soccer and fun, comedian Karen O’Leary had been invited to guest coach a kids’ soccer practice. Although only one of the seven- and eight-year-old girls knew who she was, within minutes all of them loved her. It’s difficult to account for the intensity of their reaction to her. Even when the stuff she was doing was mundane, they found it hilarious.
Early in the practice, she numbered them off into groups of three. She pointed at the first player and said “One”, which, for reasons I can’t explain, made them laugh. She pointed at the next player and said “Two”, which made them laugh even harder. By the time she said “Three”, the whole team was in stitches, despite the fact she had to that point said only three words, all of which were numbers.
She ran the team through several training drills, although to call them “drills” is to give them too much credit. One of them involved having the kids dribble in a straight line while she ran wildly and erratically through their paths. Another involved her lying down in front of the goal while they kicked balls at her. They found all this utterly hilarious. There was rarely a point where the laughter abated. But, as she explained the last drill, I knew she was about to lose them.
“This one’s pretty simple,” she said, “it’s called ‘Get the ball’.” With that, she picked up a ball and kicked it as far away as possible. “Keep your eyes on the prize!” she yelled. To my amazement, every last one of them not only ran off after it, but continued laughing as they did so, were laughing when they returned, and were still laughing several minutes later, after she’d done it several more times, and they were all clearly exhausted. At no point did a single one of them sit or lie down on the field, as they frequently do during regular practices and even games.
This is Karen O’Leary’s most obvious gift, to take the ordinary stuff of life and make it fun, to audiences of all ages. But that is only a small part of who she is.
She lives in Wellington with 11-year-old son Melvyn (who spends half his time with his other mum) and partner Eilish Wilson, a talented saxophonist who has just returned from Los Angeles, where she was studying for a Master of Fine Arts degree on a Fulbright scholarship. Wilson sometimes plays O’Leary’s favourite songs for her, which are the Goodnight Kiwi theme and the theme from Titanic.
O’Leary’s father died in May this year, while she was away visiting Wilson in Los Angeles. She loved both her parents deeply (her mum is still alive) and has talked often about how they were not just great parents but also how, if she is remotely funny, it’s because of them. She describes her father as “a f***ing great dad”.
He had cancer, and his death was not unexpected but it was still a cruel blow to lose him when she wasn’t here. “I had spent my whole life living in Wellington to be close to my mum and dad. The one time I go overseas, bloody Dad drops dead. He was laughing at me and that honestly would be the way he would think, so good one Dad.”
O’Leary is now famous for being one of the funniest people on television but until five years ago she was famous only to a group of parents in Wellington for being a full-time early childhood teacher. It was a job she’d done for almost her whole working life because she loved working with kids and loved the fact it made a difference in the world.
She only quit that job in 2020, and then only because her entertainment career was making it too hard to carry on. She says she will always have a passion for teaching, and knows she can always go back to it. She also claims it shares many similarities with her television work.
“I’m still hanging out with a diverse range of people. They’re all very creative as well, which is what young children are. They’re just a little bit taller, generally speaking. I’m hanging out with a taller bunch of people, some of who are really easy to work with and very fun, and some of who can be challenging. It’s similar to ECE, but it’s on a slightly taller scale.”
While this kind of silliness is what she’s best known for, she can also be a very serious person who cares deeply and talks earnestly about issues that matter to her. She sees herself as an activist of sorts, fighting “for people that are either getting a stink deal or are finding things challenging”.
“Whether it’s by having a big old lesbian on the TV, raising visibility for the Rainbow community – I mean, let’s be honest, me and my mates are pretty gay. So little things like that. I’ve just shifted the vehicle that I’m using to hopefully impact a bit of positive change and make people understand the value of diversity rather than being terrified of it and becoming assholes.”
While she believes there’s a place for confrontation in the pursuit of that positive change, confrontation is not her chosen method. She self-identifies as an optimist, which she sees as a “bit of a secret power”. She says it’s much easier to effect change and bring people with you when you’ve got a positive slant on things.
By way of example, she recounts a story about being asked to be on broadcaster Mark Richardson’s show, We Don’t Like Cricket.
“I was – and this changed after I met Mark – I was, like, ‘Oh, I don’t like Mark Richardson. I listen to him and I think what an absolute tw*t. I don’t like what he stands for. He’s a typical white man who is right-wing and has got some terrible ideas.’
“So I thought, ‘Well, Karen, at least if you go on there, you can have that discussion and you can’t know someone until you’ve met them.’
Although she challenged some of his ideas, she says she did it in a way that was “fun and friendly” and says she enjoyed their chat. Later, she says, someone from TVNZ told her: “That was the most open-minded I’ve heard Mark Richardson sound.”
“That’s the power of actually just getting to know people and talking to them and engaging with them,” she says. “Having a conversation in a way that’s not you having a go at someone. So I felt really good about that. You’ve got to engage with people and then, if you can have a nice time, you can slowly make them change their mind without them even realising. He changed the name of his man cave to person cave because of me, and I feel very proud about that.”
For his part, Richardson says he remembers the interview as his favourite of the series. He asked her to come on the show, he says, because she was so different from him.
He says that fairly early on in the interview, she “got” him.
“I think she worked out what I was about right pretty quick. I think she’s pretty smart.”
Asked what he meant by that, he says, “As a media personality I had a caricature which I played up to.”
Asked if she changed his mind on anything during the interview, he says, “No, I don’t think so. I think I’d rather say that maybe I was able to change her mind that 52-year-old white cis males with centre-right views aren’t actually bigots.”
O’Leary told me she was meeting with Chris Hipkins just a couple of days after our initial interview. Because she’d had 20 years of experience as an early childhood teacher and he’d spent five years as Education Minister, I asked if the topic would be education.
“No,” she said, “it’s about something completely different, which we can’t talk about.”
I knew exactly what she was talking about because it had been a recurring joke during the interview. She would be interviewing Hipkins for the Three television show Paddy Gower Has Issues, on which she is a co-host and correspondent, and which she referred to throughout our interview only as “The show we can’t talk about”.
The reason she didn’t want to talk about Paddy Gower, or the television show or the channel it screens on (Three), was that this interview had been organised by rival network TVNZ, to promote her role as one of the five contestants on season four of its hit game show Taskmaster NZ, in which comedians attempt to complete challenges for the entertainment and judgment of “The Taskmaster” Jeremy Wells and his assistant, Paul Williams.
Nevertheless, of her upcoming interview with Hipkins, she told me: “Hopefully you’ll see it next week on the telly, if you ever watch that channel. But you shouldn’t.”
I did watch it. It turned out to be part of a segment about the price of hot chips and although it was unsurprisingly lighthearted and funny, it much more surprisingly included a scoop, of sorts. Newshub later ran an online story about the scoop, under the headline: “PM Chris Hipkins refuses to rule out removing GST on potatoes as price of hot chips soars”.
Although she’s been a television “journalist” for about five minutes, it wasn’t surprising she got a scoop from her interview with the PM. She is able to get media-savvy people like the Prime Minister to say things they normally wouldn’t, in part because her bonkers interviewing technique renders their media training rulebooks useless.
“I’m very good at getting people to make faux pas,” she says.
“I don’t know what it is about me, but I end up making people say really either inappropriate things or just things that they wouldn’t normally say. It’s really great. I love it.”
When she interviewed the chief executive of Eden Park, for instance, he shared a story about the time he asked Jacinda Ardern to pressure Taylor Swift to come to New Zealand, after the star left us out of her world tour. When she interviewed the chair of the Commerce Commission about electronic transaction fees, she asked him: “Are you a tapper or an inserter?”
“I’m definitely an inserter,” he replied.
“I genuinely love talking to people,” she says. “People often do open up quite a lot and sort of tell me things that they maybe have always wanted to talk about but haven’t had the opportunity of an idiot like me saying, ‘I want to know about that.’”
O’Leary also hosts a popular podcast called Full Disclosure, in which she talks with gay and bisexual New Zealanders about their coming-out stories. Her own coming-out story was relatively drama-free. When she told her parents she was lesbian, they said, “We know dear.”
Attitudes towards LGBT+ people are now radically different from when she was a child when the number of openly gay role models on television was two: The Topp Twins. She was 5 years old and had just been watching the Topps on television when her neighbour told her not to because they were lesbians. “I remember thinking, ‘But they’re really funny.’ And I was like, ‘And what the hell is a lesbian anyway?’”
She met them for the first time at the television awards several years ago. Her Wellington Paranormal co-star Mike Minogue had to tell her to calm down, she was so excited. A year or so later, Lynda Topp played her character’s mother on Wellington Paranormal, which was a massive thrill.
Of the energy in the room when she and the Topps are together, she says: “I tell you what, we turn people lesbian. People look at us: ‘Maybe I’ll give that a go.’
“They’re just great. And I feel for them with their current struggles, but hopefully – well, not hopefully anything. But they’ve had such a positive impact on our country, and they need to be remembered at all times.”
At the end of the soccer practice, she gathered the team around her for a chat. To begin with, it was surprisingly earnest. “Whoever it is you’re playing this weekend,” she said, “don’t worry about them. The only thing you can control is…”
“The ball!” several kids ventured enthusiastically, but, on the evidence of the preceding practice, incorrectly.
“And yourselves,” she said. “And the best way to do it is by supporting every one of your teammates.”
At this point, she was interrupted by one of the players announcing that her lift had arrived and she had to leave. O’Leary looked the girl in the eye and quietly, meaningfully, said, “Please don’t go.” The girl erupted with laughter.
O’Leary continued: “So as I was saying before one of our players got kidnapped, just focus on the ball, focus on each other and – you know what? Have a good time!”
It was a good and positive message and it was possible they’d remember some of the words, but it was certain they’d remember the way she’d made them feel.
Taskmaster NZ starts Monday, August 14, 7.30pm on TVNZ 2 and TVNZ+ and continues on Tuesday.