Ankle deep in my Our Flag Means Death hyperfixation, I’ve thrown in a number of other Taika Waititi projects to talk about, but I haven’t waded much into Rhys Darby’s other work yet. Not for lack of interest, though—he’s utterly phenomenal as Stede, and I definitely want to see more of him! Rather, I’m still looking through his IMDb and going through my time-honored process of obsessively figuring out what on the list is available to stream and where. But watching a few season 1-era interviews between Darby and Waititi made me curious about his standup career, so when I saw that his most recent special was available on Amazon Prime, I went for it.
This is a fun, interesting, kooky special. Its main throughline, in a roundabout way, is actually the death of Rhys’s mother. He tells a few different stories about her and makes offhand comments like, “I miss Mum, because I think she would’ve loved that joke.” And at different times throughout the special, he brings up grief and the career crisis he went through after her death—the act has a loose framing device about his visit to see a shaman while he was shooting one of the Jumanji films in Hawaii, at a time when he was grieving, lonely, and not feeling “very funny.” It’s an intriguing choice to create a standup special around such a deep personal loss. Even though it’s also crammed with silliness and nonsense, it keeps circling back to this pain, and at times it feels a bit like a confessional.
But yes, also lots of silliness and nonsense! As my first exposure to Rhys’s brand of standup, I enjoyed myself a lot. It’s delightfully weird, with plenty of physicality and sound effects. There’s a bit of observational humor, like the difficulties of living in LA after growing up in a walking country like New Zealand (“On a long weekend, you could walk New Zealand,”) or the absolute chaos of a bird getting trapped inside a house. Oh, and I love his recurring impression about what he thinks his accent sounds like to Americans; I bust up laughing each time he does it.
Most of the routines, though, are more based in storytelling. We get some really fun anecdotes. I love the routine about Rhys’s doomed Westworld audition, with wall-to-wall robot movements and sounds. When he admits to the casting director that he’s never seen Westworld, he asks, “Is it any good?”, then adds in an exasperated aside, “Why would you say that?!?” There’s also a couple stories rooted in Rhys’s love of and talent for sound effects. I especially like the one about his experiment to see if he could get away with mimicking the self-checkout at the grocery store. And there’s a long story about how he reacts when he starts to suspect he’ll be mugged at an ATM—I get such a kick out of the line, “And I’m thinking, for just a second, ‘Shit, should I mug him?’”
Some utterly wild stuff too. The bird-trapped-in-the-house bit is part of a larger routine about all of Rhys’s past lives as birds, in which he impersonates various types of birds across time. And his closing story features a pair of aliens trying to get their faulty spaceship working before they’re spotted by a human. At one point, he laments, “They’re not gonna get in contact because we’re so weird. We keep ruining it!”
I didn’t know what to expect from Rhys as a standup comic, partly because standup is an inherently different animal than comedy acting, and partly because he’s displayed such varied comic sensibilities just in the few films and shows I’ve seen him in. His standup is wonderfully offbeat and really energetic—I had a great time with this special!
Warnings
Language, references to violence, and thematic elements.
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