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!