The Caper Club

Based upstairs in the ultra trendy Takapuna bar at the end of West Street, the Caper Club is a regular event now running on the first and third Wednesdays of each month. The room looks like the inside of a Turkish brothel (not that I know what a Turkish brothel looks like and anyone who says I do is lying) and the stage is shoe-horned into the middle of a somewhat cramped seating area. Still, we got some good seats and settled down for the show.

The compere is Anthony J Brown and he handled the usual mix of drunk students and one or two leary hecklers with aplomb. He’s not quite up to the level of Toby Foster at the Lescar, but he was pretty good nonetheless. There was a good amount of audience participation with a round of the yes/no game and a caption competition to win tickets for future shows. My entry for the caption to a picture of Ken Clarke and David Cameron was a not very original “Do you know the Tories are screwed?” “No, but if you hum it. I’ll sing it”, but at least it didn’t get booed.

The first act was Stanley Knife – it was only a matter of time before somebody came up with a chav standup character and this is it. He bounded on stage with a very upfront and aggressive style and the material was well observed on the whole, although Jan reckoned that his Sheffield accent was not very convincing. I overheard some people who had seen his act before complaining that he hadn’t added much to the routine, so there is a danger of him being a one note character. Funny once, I guess.

Next up was Mike Newell, a much more traditional and laconic standup who went down well with the largely student crowd near the front. He took a few minutes to get warmed up, but then came up with some good observational material. Nothing revolutionary or outstanding but worth seeing, I would say.

Finally was the headline act, the mighty Richard Herrings. He really is a first rate stand up now with excellent and challenging material. He takes a simple idea and then proceeds to follow it to its logical extreme and then some way beyond until he’s hammered it to death and buried it underneath the patio. Rudyard Kippling (all the cool comics are now doing Rud-yard routines apparently), monkey fucking, trout sperm and dead popes provided the starting points for one of the funniest comedy routines I have seen in a long time. It does require a modicum of patience to follow his train of thought, and some of the drunker folk in the audience started losing the thread near the end. Still, at least the most irritating of them passed out by the ticket desk and had his back covered with inky entrance stamps.

We went to say hello at the end, and I think Richard was pleased to hear that at least his virtual self in the Blogs is getting some … :-)