logo
One-line wonders: Our A - Z guide to the NZ International Comedy Festival

One-line wonders: Our A - Z guide to the NZ International Comedy Festival

NZ Herald25-04-2025

A is for Americans, via Netflix
There aren't many performers from the USA in this year's line-up. Perhaps an imbalance in the international joke trade puts the festival at risk of tariffs. Anyway, the two we are getting have Netflix to thank for their profiles abroad. Iliza Shlesinger has released six Netflix stand-up specials and has a new one on Prime Video last month. The LA Times described her as 'an elder millennial who can school Gen Z and Alpha

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

‘This never happens': Bailey Poching on getting cast in Netflix's North of North
‘This never happens': Bailey Poching on getting cast in Netflix's North of North

The Spinoff

time3 hours ago

  • The Spinoff

‘This never happens': Bailey Poching on getting cast in Netflix's North of North

The comedian and actor takes us through his life in television. It was on a Monday morning that actor and comedian Bailey Poching recorded his audition for Netflix's North of North, describing himself as being 'a hair's breadth' from throwing in the towel and heading back into hospitality. He sent his tape in, and got a reply that afternoon asking if he could audition in his own accent. By Tuesday, he had a Zoom meeting with Netflix and the showrunners. By Wednesday, he had got the job. Less than a week later, he was shooting his first scene in the Arctic Canadian territory of Nunavut in -40 degree conditions. 'I think I'll be telling that story for the rest of my life,' Poching laughs. 'It was like trying to appreciate the feeling of winning the lottery in real time. We romanticise this happening, but this never happens for actors.' For the next three months, Poching played Colin, a radio DJ looking to find love in the arctic circle in Netflix's first Canadian production – and the first show of its kind to be centered around the indigenous Inuk community. 'It felt like capturing something really special, and it was really cool to be even peripheral to that,' he says. Poching, who is Māori and Samoan, says he learned a lot about story sovereignty from being a part of the groundbreaking series. 'I remember asking the showrunners for advice on making indigenous TV shows and they were like 'you will have an easier time, because at least there's a precedent for indigenous film and TV in New Zealand',' he says. 'There was a sense of reckoning with the fact that, in our position as Pacific and Māori storytellers, we do have more opportunities than some of our indigenous whānau around the world to make television – even if there's still not heaps.' Closer to home, Poching is a part of another important onscreen kōrero in Don't, TVNZ's new big issue comedy series. In it, comedian Bubbah is joined by a host of funny friends to interrogate the big issues facing rangatahi today. Poching's episode is all about marriage, including interviewing university students and rest home residents alike about their attitudes towards it. 'The title is quite provocative, but Don't really holds space for so many different cultural and social perspectives on what marriage represents, the origins of it and how we feel about it now,' he says. 'There's no sense of judgment in it at all.' A lot of that, he says, comes down to host Bubbah's own curiosity about the world. 'She has such an interesting lens and so much to say, but she's also an incredible listener.' Taking a leaf out of the beloved comedian's book, we carefully listened to Poching's eclectic life in television, including Scottish Wipe Out for kids and how Coca-Cola made him famous in Australia. My earliest TV memory is… I spent the first 19 years of my life in the UK, and so my TV memories are of CBBC, the children's BBC channel, and a show called Balamory. The jingle really sticks in my head – ' what's the story in Balamory, wouldn't you like to know?' It's one of those things that I'll say to myself, but then people here don't really know what I'm talking about. We also had lots of VHS tapes of The Wiggles, and they did a crossover episode with the crocodile hunter Steve Irwin. It was like Avengers: Endgame. The show I would rush home from school to watch was… I watched so much TV as a kid. Superhero cartoons were huge for me – X Men, Spider Man, Fantastic Four. There was a game show called Raven that was like Wipe Out, but fantasy themed and for kids. The host was called Raven and he wore a feathered cloak and had a big staff. If a kid failed a challenge, he would like place his staff on the kid's shoulder, and then they disappeared. It was the most terrifying thing – that kid just applied to be on a TV show, now he's vanished. My first time on television was… A Coca-Cola commercial, just before Covid. I was playing an Uber Eats driver and I appear for two seconds at the end. Honestly, because of the way TV commercials work, that really helped me out through Covid. I didn't realise it played in Australia as well, so I had family sending me photos and it was a huge moment of pride. Now, I don't know how I would feel about doing a Coca-Cola commercial, but I needed that at the time. My favourite NZ TV ad is… This was such a phenomenon for me moving here, when I realised that a lot of these local ads have vice-like grip on people of a certain generation. I remember Ghost Chips was huge on YouTube. The 'do it yourself' kid tradies were also pretty big in my house because I have a dad who grew up in New Zealand and a mum who grew up in Australia. Any kind of recognition of those two countries was always nice. My TV guilty pleasure is… Any YouTube show where celebrities eat food, so things like Hot Ones and the Angela Hartnett and Nick Grimshaw podcast Dish. I'll line up a bunch of those while I'm making food or cleaning up and just watch celebrities eating food. I love food, and I'm interested in celebrities as well. They are kind of like the modern talk show. A TV moment that haunts me is… Anything from the David Tennant Doctor Who era, which had a lot of really scary stuff in it. I remember there were these monsters that had pig faces and human bodies, or one big brain with a single eye and all these tentacles. It traumatised me – I asked my brother to wait outside the bathroom while I was showering, because I was so scared. My favourite TV character is… Mark Corrigan from Peep Show. Word for word, some of the funniest dialogue maybe ever put on television. I have a deep affection and appreciation for cringe humour and he's a character whose whole purpose is putting his foot in his mouth while also having that common trope of unearned confidence and being so certain of himself. He's so smart, he's done everything he was told to do growing up, and he's still a failure. It's so poetically funny. My favourite TV project I've ever been involved in is… North of North is a very special one because of the indigenous kaupapa. It feels like such a triumph to have that story on TV, and to be even peripheral to it was such an honour. But I have to make a special mention to Kid Sister, because Simone Nathan was kind enough to give me that opportunity and I had a blast. A TV project I wish I could be involved in is… I always romanticise the lifestyle of an SNL writer, where you pitch on Monday, and then you're up all Tuesday night writing the silliest stuff. And I feel like I've seen a picture of Bobby Moynihan smoking a cigarette out a window and they're all there with Bill Hader and Seth Meyers. This idea of working with your closest, funniest friends would be my dream. That, or doing a voice on a superhero cartoon. My controversial TV opinion is… We should be making weirder television and taking more creative risks. I think there's so much space for us to explore the weirder stories of New Zealand, rather than packaging up something neat for a global audience. There's a lot of idiosyncrasies and dark little stories for us to tell, and not just in the grim murder mystery way. I think there's so much to explore still in our underrepresented communities, and I dream of seeing abstract, surreal, artistic television made here. A TV show I will never watch, no matter how many people tell me I should is… The White Lotus is becoming that for me. I remember, with season one, seeing that it was a show about privilege, set in Hawaii, and that was the cast? I think this trend of shows about people with too much privilege is hopefully curving downward, because the more seasons it gets, the more it's too much homework now to catch up on. I'm sure it's actually incredible, but something about that initial idea turned me away from it. The last thing I watched on television was… The first season of Severance, which was really good. I got told to catch up before season two started, so I watched the whole of season one on a plane and it was gripping – I was totally locked in. Interesting craft, interesting filmmaking decisions, interesting writing decisions, and all just carried by great performance and production design. Well-crafted TV.

Taylor Swift regains control of her music, buys back first six albums
Taylor Swift regains control of her music, buys back first six albums

1News

time7 days ago

  • 1News

Taylor Swift regains control of her music, buys back first six albums

Taylor Swift has regained control over her entire body of work. In a lengthy note posted to her official website on Friday, Swift announced: 'All of the music I've ever made now belongs to me.' The pop star said she purchased her catalogue of recordings — originally released through Big Machine Records — from their most recent owner, the private equity firm Shamrock Capital. She did not disclose the amount. In recent years, Swift has been rerecording and releasing her first six albums in an attempt to regain control of her music. 'I can't thank you enough for helping to reunite me with this art that I have dedicated my life to, but have never owned until now,' Swift addressed fans in the post. 'The best things that have ever been mine … finally actually are.' ADVERTISEMENT 'We are thrilled with this outcome and are so happy for Taylor,' Shamrock Capital said in a statement. Swift's rerecordings were instigated by Hybe America CEO Scooter Braun's purchase and sale of her early catalogue, which represents Swift's effort to control her own songs and how they're used. Previous 'Taylor's Version' releases have been more than conventional re-recordings, arriving with new 'from the vault' music, Easter eggs and visuals that deepen understanding of her work. 'I am happy for her,' Braun said Friday. She has also released new music, including last year's The Tortured Poets Department, announced during the 2024 Grammys and released during her record-breaking tour. Taylor Swift attends an in conversation with Taylor Swift event at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 9, 2022. (Source: Associated Press) So far, there have been four rerecorded albums, beginning with Fearless (Taylor's Version) and Red (Taylor's Version) in 2021. All four have been massive commercial and cultural successes, each one debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Swift's last rerecording, 1989 (Taylor's Version), arrived in October 2023, just four months after the release of Speak Now (Taylor's Version). That was the same year Swift claimed the record for the woman with the most No. 1 albums in history. ADVERTISEMENT Fans have theorised that Reputation (Taylor's Version) would be next: On May 19, Look What You Made Me Do (Taylor's Version) aired nearly in full during the opening scene of a Season 6 episode of The Handmaid's Tale. Prior to that, the song was teased in 2023's Prime Video limited-series thriller Wilderness and in Apple TV+'s The Dynasty: New England Patriots in 2024. Also in 2023, she contributed Delicate (Taylor's Version) to Prime Video's The Summer I Turned Pretty. But according to the note shared Friday, Swift says she hasn't 'even rerecorded a quarter of it'. She did say, however, that she has completely rerecorded her self-titled debut album, 'and I really love how it sounds now'. Swift writes that both her self-titled debut and Reputation (Taylor's Version) 'can still have their moments to reemerge when the time is right'. Representatives for Swift and HYBE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Auckland's best hummus? Comedian Mo Amer fails to get Gemmayze St hummus into Australia
Auckland's best hummus? Comedian Mo Amer fails to get Gemmayze St hummus into Australia

NZ Herald

time30-05-2025

  • NZ Herald

Auckland's best hummus? Comedian Mo Amer fails to get Gemmayze St hummus into Australia

Palestinian-American stand-up comedian Mo Amer told Australian television viewers the hummus he ate in Auckland was one of the smoothest he'd eaten. Chickpeas or a spreadable paste? Either way, a jar of hummus from an Auckland restaurant has won the highest possible praise from an international comedic connoisseur – even if he couldn't get it on to the next leg of his tour. Mo Amer, Palestinian-American stand-up comedian and Netflix television

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store