Andrew Max­well is baffled by New Zea­l­and.

And fair enough too.

As he so lov­ingly puts it, our news cycle is a mad mess of fallen trees and cats on buses. We spend far too much time caring about things that aren’t glob­al polit­ic­al con­flicts and Trump. Why should we worry about glob­al polit­ics when we’re so far away? As an Irish comedi­an – and thus way closer to any shit that could go down – Maxwell’s got far more to worry about than we do.

Show­time is a fun mix of Kiwi-based non­sense, excel­lent accents, and quite a lot of talk about Brexit. While I’m, once again, prob­ably not quite in his demo­graph­ic, this show was a well-writ­ten sixty minutes of stand-up, and I had no trouble find­ing parts of it that worked for me.

Maxwell’s accent skills are won­der­ful. It takes a lot of prac­tise to get a Kiwi accent down well, and he def­in­itely hits the mark. One par­tic­u­lar Queen St-based anec­dote had mul­tiple accent changes in an incred­ibly short amount of time, and it was rad to hear (espe­cially because the scen­ario was so very Kiwi).

What was espe­cially refresh­ing with­in Maxwell’s set was how he spoke on polit­ics (Trump, Brexit, and the like). Don’t get me wrong, politi­cism in com­edy is fant­ast­ic, but if you’re com­ing to a com­edy show at a bar on a rainy Wel­ling­ton night, it’s nice to have things that aren’t polit­ic­al at all to break up talk on the dis­mal state of the world.

Show­time is for you if you like going to a bar and listen­ing to some mel­low stand-up com­edy. While it is not espe­cially ground­break­ing, Andrew Max­well is an excel­lent orator and an unique inter­na­tion­al choice to see dur­ing this fest­iv­al.

Show­time is run­ning at San Fran in Wel­ling­ton at 7.00pm from now until Sat­urday. Get amongst!