Laugh! Review: Raybon of the Lost Ark

The Laugh Chamber, Auckland Town Hall

Review: Gilbert Wong

Forget Spielberg. Comedian Raybon Kan has - admitting on his first night that it was just a cute title. It could have been Raybon and Juliet except, as Kan made plain, he was a product of a more happening kind of time when nobody actually reads Shakespeare unless it is the Coles notes version. He's more of an Enter the Raybon kind of guy.

For "classic," read over-rated, he opined. That hole in the ground, he said, "classic toilet." Classical music, he snorted. Aren't all those orchestras really covers bands?

Like us, he wanted his gratification now. Modern advances like the 60-minute photolab meant we could now enjoy our memories of what we had done just that morning even quicker. That was Kan's kind of age.

Ever the optimist when summing up the merits of the modern, he pointed out that the troubles with "pervy male scoutmasters" had at least ensured that Outdoor Pursuits meant exactly that. When it came to shallowness, Kan was ready to take it to new depths.

As any first-night audience, we were ready to laugh. On stage Kan has never had a fearsome presence. He's not the sort of comedian that you automatically avoid the front row for. Cripes, he even giggles in an endearing way at his own jokes.

You can take your granny to see him and not have to worry that you will be embarrassed explaining the jokes. He is an everyman rather than a stage bully and, just as we would be, he can sometimes seem a little nervy up there.

The audience picks up on his unease and, for the most part, elects not to give Kan a hard time. The one ambitious heckler was efficiently if not originally dealt with, "This is why cousins should not marry." (That must be standard insult No 2 in the NZQA certified course Stand Up101)

Previous performances have referred to his Chinese New Zealand childhood, but maybe Kan has caught up because the new show relies largely on his skew on current events. Though in the case of Clinton and Monica, the raw material has been so thoroughly mined that it was hard for Kan to come up with any new gems.

He did find moments of brilliance in the sheer weirdness that sees Te Papa, in the year before the millennium, bring in a collection of Star Trek memorabilia.

Kan went to hear the lecturer on Klingon, who the national museum had flown over. When this sort of thing occurs, it makes it hard for comedians. As Kan said, "I am not making this up."

So good, but not great. And, if anything, Kan learned one thing on the first night: forget the K word. The Kosovo joke flew like a lead Zeppelin. It will need many more years before we can laugh at that sorry scene.