Bats, Herald Theatre
May 16-20, 23-37 | Reviewed by Ian Christopher

Rhys Darby and Dai Henwood are by all accounts very good stand-up comics in their own right. Together in their show The Everymen, they just don’t work. The Everymen is a series of character sketches purporting to give some insight into the Kiwi male. What we get is actually a kind of live version of Full Frontal, or Skitz, or some other bad mid-ninties TV sketch show.

There are laughs to be had – Henwood’s Maori lawyer evading dolphin poaching charges is beautifully surreal in parts, and his East Coast bank-teller-turned-dating-expert is wonderful. The parts that got the big laughs, however, were the observational comedy turns within the acts, not the acts themselves.

Darby’s characters were uniformly bad. His strongest character, a park ranger, was a straight Fred Dag cliché and his other personas were sloppily written, uninspired, and generally unfunny. They relied on bad, obvious jokes and never pushed into the realms of absurdity that made Henwood’s characters work.

The result of the collaboration was an uneven, see-sawing production that was dragged down into school-quality panto when the characters interacted in the final few sketches.

See their solo shows; give this one a miss.

For full programme, venue and show details on this and other Comedy Festival events, visit comedyfestival.co.nz.