Review: Token African (Urzila Carlson)

With a few lit­tle obser­va­tions to warm up the crowd, Urzi­la, “does­n’t pick on peo­ple,” she says, and rein­forces that she can’t see any­one in the crowd because of the raised seat­ing at Te Aua­ha’s Tapere Nui the­atre. She rolls into talk­ing about Welling­ton, stu­dents, and how nobody in their right mind would ever con­tin­ue work­ing if they won Lot­to.

“Is any­one on a first date here?” She asks, peer­ing into the crowd, and the audi­ence is com­plete­ly silent. Some­one yells, in a way that’s prob­a­bly rather too loud, “Sec­ond date!” and Urzi­la takes it in her stride and rolls right along to talk about ide­al places to take peo­ple on a first date if you want to test their met­tle.

Carl­son has tak­en one of those Ances­try DNA tests, and the main thread of the show leaves us want­i­ng, won­der­ing quite how the per­cent­ages bal­ance out, and when revealed, it’s slight­ly dif­fer­ent to what we’re expect­ing.

The stage is decked out in rain­bow colours, and it’s a relief, to me. This show is unashamed­ly queer, but not quite in the way that a lot of queer comics are, and is like­ly for an audi­ence slight­ly old­er than myself, but I had a good time all the same.

On a whole, Token African is a very fun show with lit­tle risk — it was my com­pan­ion’s first ever stand-up show and she had a very good time, and so did I. Carl­son is quite a like­able com­ic, and great to watch out­side of the bounds of the short-form pan­el show for­mat.