The Big Show is a 100-minute extrav­a­gan­za with three UK come­di­ans who you may or may not have heard of. (The com­e­dy world is big, okay?) Despite my utter obliv­i­ous­ness to whom two out of three of them were, this three-act show was a whole lot of fun.

Ian Smith

Act­ing as our MC for the night, Ian Smith per­formed twice dur­ing the near­ly two-hour long show. Ian’s per­for­mance was utter­ly, utter­ly bonkers, and thor­ough­ly enjoy­able. Tak­ing us through tales of vis­it­ing Wait­o­mo, trav­el­ling to Nor­way and his weird neigh­bour with too many fan­ny packs, his per­for­mance was joy­ous and rife with ridicu­lous imagery. He seemed to have a severe dis­taste for broc­coli on toast, and hon­est­ly, I can’t blame him.

Phil Wang

Phil Wang’s par­ents met at a kung-fu class. That’s not even a joke, it’s true.

Incred­i­bly artic­u­late, with a slight twinge of the pompous, Phil’s per­for­mance was the wild­card sand­wiched between two fair­ly low stakes acts. Touch­ing on slight­ly-unortho­dox dat­ing meth­ods, the per­ils of hav­ing a cer­tain last name in some parts of soci­ety, and the priv­i­lege that women have because they’re allowed to love babies (not in a weird way), his act was unique and prob­a­bly slight­ly polar­is­ing to some. I look for­ward to see­ing more of his work in com­ing years.

Jim­my McGhie

Wellington’s audi­ences were out in full, mani­a­cal force when it came to the head­line act. Jim­my McGhie spent a sig­nif­i­cant amount of his act fend­ing off heck­lers — from one who yelled that ‘South Lon­don was an oxy­moron’, to anoth­er who said that ‘zhoosh’ was their favourite word — and it turned the whole show into a bit of a sham­bles. An incred­i­bly fun­ny sham­bles — because it became obvi­ous that Jim­my had a fair amount of prac­tice in the ‘fend­ing off heck­lers’ area, and did so with much aplomb — but a sham­bles nonethe­less.

Jim­my was an incred­i­bly like­able, very ver­bose per­former with excel­lent turns of phrase. He was prob­a­bly an act more for a Gen Y audi­ence — as he asked how many mil­len­ni­als were in the audi­ence dur­ing the show and there was a grand total of six of us (before he start­ed resound­ing­ly mock­ing our cof­fee cul­ture) — but his anec­dotes about mil­len­ni­al par­ents and get­ting old­er were some­how still relat­able.

In all, this show was a great way to see old favourites, be intro­duced to new tal­ent, and watch three shows for only slight­ly more than the price of one. Get tick­ets quick­ly, because they’re near­ly sold out!

The Big Show is run­ning at 8.30pm at Te Aua­ha in Welling­ton from now until Sat­ur­day. Get amongst!