Public Address - OnPoint (Home)

Comedy Festival: An interview with Mrs Peacock (Part 2) | Apr 28, 2008 01:31

KN: At what point is the really offensive stuff a piss take of yourselves, and at what point does it get so offensive that it becomes offensive again?
JS: We're getting into this weird period – I think it's internationally as well – it seems like every comedian's got a rape joke, or something like that.
DS: Or abortion, there's abortion gags.
JS: I don't know, like I'd probably go abortion in a song, but I don't know if... You know, it's a fine line, there's areas you wouldn't delve into.

KN: Is there pressure for comedians to be more and more offensive just as a kind of a stunt?
DS: Some people do do it, but I don't know if there is a need to. In Auckland, Dave Wiggins is running a show called The Clean Comedy Show, which is a regular gig he has. He plays to churches, and it's an all-ages kind of thing. And it's no swears, nice themes, and it's kind of...

KN: No anal sex or bestiality?
DS: No, no. Oh, he did one, accidentally.
It was something about because he's an American and he lives in West Auckland, he says he lives out West and it makes him feel like a cowboy. He says: 'But, you know, I came in my car. I don't have a horse, I don't know how you'd come in a horse?'
And I had to leave the room, because I was about to lose it. And there were a couple of people who laughed in the crowd who shouldn't have been laughing. But most of the people just let it go.

KN: Have you guys ever played to a crowd that's just been aghast at jokes involving flange?
JB: Many times.
DS: We use to do it on purpose. In the early days, we would write the offensive songs, and play them in Wellington wherever we could, and enjoyed it when people walked out. You know, watching people leave and going 'ha, ha, got you'.
JB: We like to think we've grown up a bit.
DS: Yeah we've definitely grown up a bit.

KN: So what did your mothers think of that phase?
JB: My mother's filthy, so.
DS: My mum's never seen me, she's lived in Australia all of my comedy life. Oh she's seen me do a couple of gigs, but she's never seen me do a full-on Peacock gig since we got offensive.
JB: Oh my mum's given us lines.

KN: Oh Jesus.
JB: No, not deliberately, she's just said something. She's said something and we've gone 'aha, that's going in the show'.

KN: Do people ever not realise that you've being offensive, or just not realise you're being ironic?
DS: Early on, our first gig in Blenheim, a lovely old lady in a wheelchair came up to us after and she said 'I'm not sure what you were singing about, but you sounded beautiful.'
JB: I guess you don't want to accuse people of not getting it, because comedy is such a subjective thing, but some people, for some part of it – like when we're doing cock rock, talking us up – haven't quite got it.
Like the [song] Almost Pretty, and it was one that got reviewed in Christchurch. They singled us out when we were live, because we used the line 'I don't look at the mantel piece when I'm stoking the fire'. And, you know it's an old cliché, and that's why we used it. But he just repeated that line and went 'please!'.

KN: The regular Mrs Peacock songs – you guys have been playing that stuff for a while, right? Does it take you guys a long time to build up that body of material?
DS: Yeah, a lot of those songs could be as old as us almost.
JS: Well, as old as the act. We've been going about nine years. Our oldest songs we revisited and rewrote. Well, at least rewrote the music for it, because when we started out we were sort of...

KN: Shit?
JB: Yeah.
DS: Yeah, that's probably the best word.
JB: But also just musically really... limited.

KN: Are you guys formally trained in music?
JB: No, no particular musical training and most of our music performances has been with [Mrs Peacock], so any growth has been specifically with musical comedy, so it's all entertaining. And Dave lives in Auckland and I live in Wellington, so it's been even more fun, so most of our crap is on stage.

KN: How does that work, that you guys just don't see each other at all?
DS: It's like a band, you can always go and play your greatest hits. But because we're only ever doing 15, 20 minute sets, there are some that always go in the cycle, and there are some that we chop and change and take out. If it's a quieter crowd, a less offensive crowd, we stick in a couple of the nicer ones. Masturbation rather than sheep fucking, themes like that.

KN: Do you guys have a scale for that?
JB: We did try and formally work it out at some stage. We got a list of all our songs and tried to give them a rating. I think I tried to put them into mild, medium and hot.

KN: What falls into each of these categories? What are the markers that tell you this is a mild song, this is a hot song?
JB: It's kind of based on reaction. Sometimes we don't necessarily know, we have a guess of how a song is going to go beforehand.
DS: Like the one we've been playing recently, Sweet Dreamer. We didn't think that was offensive, and then one night, the crowd just went 'oh my God'. Then we thought about it and we thought about it. 'Hold on what's he... oh, he wants to take a girl in a coma home and have sex with her, but not let his flatmate partake.' And then it's 'okay, that is quite offensive actually'.

KN: So are your songs inspired from your own lives?
DS: I've never known anyone in a coma.

KN: No horses...?
JS: No, we're just very imaginative.
DS: [In our] mid-20s there were a few interesting things...
JS: It was a very narrow band.

KN: Um, alright. Why does New Zealand have so many musical comedy duos?
JB: We've both done solo stuff, but in general doing Mrs Peacock is easier. It's less nerve-racking. You're sitting back stage shitting yourself before a solo act, but not with Mrs Peacock.
Jermaine said to me in the past that he doesn't know how someone could do solo stand-up. The idea terrifies him. So, you know, maybe there's a reason that we do the duo thing. It's a way into it for people who aren't necessarily that extraverted on all the time.
And that's really us. There are people who are just full on...
DS: "Hey, I'm a comedian, comedian, comedian!"
JB: That's not us.

KN: What's one other act from the Comedy Festival, that you'd recommend?
DS: I'd like to see Josie Long, but I'm not going to get a chance to... JB: She was the best newcomer of the Edinburgh Festival in 06, I think. For me – he's been here before – but David O'Dougherty is amazing.

KN: What's his act called?
DS: It's David O'Dougherty Time, yeah. I saw him in 2006 and he was genius, that hour show was really good.
JB: He's a musical act as well, he has like a little Casio keyboard and sits there and does kind of songs.
DS: Silly little songs, but just cute. Just a nice change of pace, something you wouldn't see in New Zealand.

KN: Cool, thanks guys!

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Rock opera, with lasers, in Wellington tonight | Apr 23, 2008 15:34

Musical comedy duo Mrs Peacock, featuring Jarrod Baker (also of Newtown Ghetto Anger) and Dave Smith will be featuring at the Comedy Festival, performing their brand new rock opera show – Six Feet from the Edge. It's is going to be performed for the first time ever tonight, and it will have "giant lasers". Friggin' lasers!

This is the teaser for an interview I did with them yesterday. It's a teaser mostly because I've been a slack bastard and hadn't got around to editing it until this afternoon, and their first show is on tonight, at 8pm at BATS Theatre in Wellington. Will post the rest – an enlightening discussion on the nature of offensive jokes and other things – soon; Friday, if I can get my day-job stuff done without passing out from caffine overdose.

(Mrs Peacock were the 2007 winner of the Billy T James Award, and also worthy recipients of the NZ Comedy Guild's Most Offensive Gag award in 2005, and the identical award at the Wellington Comedy Awards in 2006.)

KN: So what's a rock opera?
DS: The Who did rock operas, where it was just a story through music.

KN: Like The Wall or something?
DS: Yeah, like The Wall, but we've taken the Andrew Lloyd Webber, the musical side. It's a story, like Evita I guess.
JB: So it's a musical, but less...

KN: Gay?
JB: Yeah.
DS: I think gay is the word.
JB: We'll say camp.

KN: So is it going to be offensive?
DS: There will be moments, but all in all it's a nice story. It's gentle, it's fun.
JB: And relatively tame. It's not going to lack for swearing, but it's probably not going to have quite the same content [as Mrs Peacock's old acts], because we are trying to sell our story over the last 12 months. And that was actually a relatively tame story.

KN: Why does the story of your lives include lasers?
JB: We've believed for a long time our stage show needs to be a lot more spectacular. Comedy clubs, they can't contain the rock that we have.
DS: Yeah we've wanted lasers, flashy lights for a long time.
JB: And it gives us the rock element of it. Yeah, but also we went to see We Will Rock You, and that was a big production.

KN: That had lasers?
DS: Lasers. Definitely lasers. With lots of smoke.
JB: We don't quite have their budget.
DS: No.
JB: But I do have contacts to get me a free laser, so...

KN: So it's just one laser?
JB: We're not sure what we're getting yet. We're hoping it will be one of the ones that fires it through a prism and does exciting things. But, you know, it could be a laser pointer on a string.
DS: That's alright, a cat playing with a laser pointer is fine too.

KN: As long as there is laser in it?
DS: Well there is laser, yeah, there's definitely going to be laser.
JB: We wouldn't want to be accused of false advertising. There will be a laser.
DS: If we have to put laser pointers on an oscillating fan on the side of the stage, we'll do that.
JB: I don't think it will come to that.
DS: No, I don't think so.

KN: So you reckon lasers are going to give you a leg up over Flight of the Concords, I mean they don't have any lasers?
DS: They don't have lasers. But they do have a guitar from the future which is a little unfair.

KN: But that doesn't have lasers does it?
JB: We'll see, when we get a TV show, we'll talk about who's got a leg up. Certainly, we're aiming for something quite different. More like a play, or a musical.

KN: So it's kind of theatrical?
DS: Yes very theatrical. We both started out as actors, you know.

KN: Really?
DS: That's what we studied as and then found out that I don't like actors very much.

KN: What's wrong with actors?
DS: I don't know, they're weird. They're a different kind of insecure to comedians. Comedians have their own special kind of insecure, and self esteem issues. It's hard to explain the difference. But there are different issues between comedians and actors.

KN: Do musical comedians fit into a third category?
DS: Yes, definitely.

KN: Do musical theatrical comedians fit into a fourth category?
JB: Possibly, I think, it's a bit all over the place. Bret's a dancer.
DS: Oh really, I did not know that.
JB: His mum's a dance teacher.

KN: Who's mum?
JB: Bret's mum.

KN: Oh.
JB: So we don't have that to offer.
DS: No, I did do two years of dance, jazz, ballet, but it's probably not appropriate for a rock.
JB: There will be some slow motion drum and base dancing. We're covering a broad musical spectrum this time.

KN: So is The Flange your most offensive song?
DS: Oh no, nowhere near.

KN: What would be your most offensive song, on an objective scientific basis?
DS: From a scientific basis I would say it has to be one that we don't play often. It's called Phantom of the Days of our Lives. We won the most offensive gag in 2005 with Walking the Line, which is a very offensive song.
JB: So let's write one that's worse...
DS: And we did, we put our entire filthy efforts into it and came out with a horrible, horrible song.
JB: That year, we didn't even get nominated. I think the one that won that year was a joke involving the Kahui Twins.

KN: Domestic violence trumps sexual innuendo?
DS: That actually does offend me, physical violence towards anyone. Just talking about someone crapping on someone's chest doesn't bother me.
JB: If you talked about bum sex, is that really offensive? Unlike say... I don't know, genocide?

KN: Are you guys secretly not offensive?
JB: Well I have a theory to that. Because most of it is more silly, and making fun of ourselves rather than, say, advocating bizarre sexual practices.
DS: Having said that there are people out there doing it, so they should have music too, you know? We've just found a song that we wrote that insinuates horse intercourse, which is fine. People do it, I've seen it on the internet. It must happen.
JB: It's still legal in some states in the US, so...

KN: Not in New Zealand though.
JB: But travel is good, the global horse sex tourism trade...

KN: New Zealand has some good horses and we export them all over the world.
DS: Yeah, beautiful horses...
(More later...)

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You don't need double-talk – you need Bob Loblaw! | Apr 21, 2008 11:59

Ah, lawyers. Sometimes, I wonder if they're so super-clever, that they're actually being hilariously ironic with a straight face and laughing their arses off behind our backs.

Take, for example, this correction and apology penned with sincerity and conviction by HotTopic, by his own free – completely uncoerced – will.

Correction and apology to The Listener and its editor Pamela Stirling
On 16 April 2008 we published on this site an article written by Gareth Renowden entitled "Climate cranks claim a scalp". That article suggested that Dave Hansford had been sacked by The Listener as a result of views that he expressed on climate change, and that The Listener had caved in to pressure from the NZ Climate Science Coalition, or had sacked him because his views did nor coincide with those of The Listener's editor, Pamela Stirling. The article also questioned The Listener's commitment to environmental issues and its editorial integrity and independence, and was critical of its conduct with respect to Mr Hansford. In fact Mr Hansford was not sacked by The Listener, and nor did The Listener seek to censor or suppress Mr Hansford's views. Hot Topic and AUT Media Ltd accept that The Listener and its editor have a strong commitment to environmental issues, and that there was no basis for any of the criticisms expressed on this site of either The Listener or its editor, or of the editorial integrity and independence of The Listener. Hot Topic and AUT Media Ltd unreservedly withdraw those statements an apologise to The Listener and to Pamela Stirling for the distress caused by our publication.

Clearly, there's some very sophisticated irony at work here. A climate change publication is accusing a media organisation of shutting down a voice on climate change. The media organisation then gently convinces said climate change publication to STFU, and to announce (in the manner of those convicted by Soviet show-trials) that the media organisation is in no way shutting down voices on climate change.

Steven Price, over at the Media Law Journal, hopes that "the [original] post receives exponentially greater attention as a result of this legal threat."

I don't say that because I'm a free speech absolutist, or because I think the internet ought to be a law-free zone. In general, I think people who defame others online deserve all they get. I doubt this is the first time internet material has been removed in NZ as a result of a legal threat, and I'm sure it won't be the last. Nope, I object to this because I think the Listener has used a tenuous legal claim to bully a blogger into retracting some moderate and reasonable criticisms. I don't like it when anyone does this, but it's particularly ugly when the heavies are acting for the media."

Not me. As a satirist, I just think it's beautiful. So, so beautiful. The perfect symmetry of irony, the flawless technical delivery. I appreciate it, simply, as art.

Speaking of silly things you can do with a lawyer, suing your way onto the ballot is, apparently, not enough. You also have to declare:

'The people in the electorate of Selwyn deserve someone who is of immediate Cabinet material, I am able to offer that opportunity,' Mr Payne told the court."

Well done, Mr Payne. I wish you all the best in filling Brian Connell's large, red, floppy shoes.

For your future legal needs, you might wish to try:

(Or, if you prefer, in Spanish.)

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Dear Peter Brown: *Hug* | Apr 04, 2008 01:57

I've been asked recently to comment on NZ First's latest stab at the Yellow Peril (the race, not the blog). My response? Give the man a hug. Not in a condescending sort of way, but seriously, give him – and all those whose alienation he's appealing to (and exploiting, to an extent) – a big hug.

If I sound like a hemp-wearing hippy, that can be attributed to my recent conversion to the Church of Obama. (Amen.)

What Brown said was pretty straightforward. He cites the StatsNZ Ethnic Population Projections, which show that the proportion of Asian New Zealanders are going to go from 10% in 2006 to 16% in 2026.

He drops in a quarter-century old red herring – that Asians will outnumber Maori, therefore dislocating them. This is a red herring because Asian New Zealanders are as Pakeha (and as much Her Majesty's subjects, if you will) as European New Zealanders. It doesn't matter that Asian New Zealanders are not related to the original signatories – or, more crudely, of the same stock as them. The Treaty's power comes via the lineage of the nation which it created, not the literal lineage of the people who signed it.

But that's just a sideshow. The main point that he makes is that Asians can't integrate into New Zealand, that Asians "will form their own mini-societies to the detriment of integration and that will lead to division, friction and resentment."

NZ First first hawked this message in 1993, when I was 11 then. Times have change. A lot.

We see integration at the most fundamental levels. In schools, in workplaces, at the coffee shop, in the noodle bar. We chat, we hang out, we laugh, we play, we pray, we hook up, we breed. Race has not been a boundary for a long time.

We see this. But Peter Brown – and the people his message is directed at – don't. Brown is right that the face of New Zealand is changing. Of course it is. But even as many New Zealanders have grown more cosmopolitan, formed genuine connections with the once-mysterious Orient, taken in the breadth of cultures which have grown with – and into – each other, many others haven't. This change has not been as inclusive as it could've been.

Brown's is a voice of genuine alienation. (Even if his motivations were less than genuine, the alienation that he's trying to tap into is.) There are people in this country who don't understand the changes that are happening. It's a gap that comes with age, wealth, location and education as much as it's about simple outlook and open-mindedness. And if our goal is to build an inclusive multicultural society, it's not just us, it's them that we have to include.

My conversion to Obamaranity came at the very point when so many howled with outrage – when he talked about his grandmother in his speech on race:

I can no more disown [Reverend Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

"These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love."

It was the antithesis to the politics of shame which characterises racial politics: to call people racist, and to demand that they feel ashamed of themselves. He was unashamed of the parts of her which can be described as racist. He was unashamed of her. It wasn't just an open embrace, but also open eyes – he was acknowledging the racial tensions that exist, as manifested in Reverend Wright's sermons, as manifested in his grandmother. It's real, it's there, it's part of society as it is now, but it doesn't have to be part of the future.

It was a recognition that these dynamics are complex – more complex than "right vs wrong" – and that ultimately, it's the embrace, not the rebuke, that will break down those barriers.

My own experience of this came in 2004, when the National Front marched on Parliament. When the National Front were on their way out, the assorted anarchists and punks chased them near the Law School, whereupon fearless leader Kyle Chapman and others jumped into their cars and drove off.

One National Front member, Cale Olsen, was left behind. A quick scuffle ensued, Cale got smacked and was left alone and bleeding, surrounded by a angry, jeering crowd. They chased and hounded him down the street. The look on their faces said it all.

I felt myself wanting to help him. I still remember thinking how powerful, how utterly life-changing a helping hand would have been, and how all that venom and bile changed nothing. I missed my chance, and remained on the sidelines. Cale was there, once again, in 2006.

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Brownlee: Now 93.5% fact-free! | Apr 02, 2008 03:16

It was a bracing kind of meeting, and I should've ordered something harder than orange juice. I wanted – needed – to hear it, to get that bucket of cold water thrown at my face. And bless him, he was happy to give it to me.

This was a few months back, at the beginning of "Phase I" of my conspiracy for numeracy. I was meeting with a senior parliamentary press secretary at Dog and Bone to pitch my idea: a wiki-styled website which fact-checked politicians and promoted transparency by hosting source data. It was at once an open offer ("if you know the other side is making shit up, we can be a platform for that information") and a thinly-veiled, but generally wholesome, threat.

He wasn't exactly trying to disuade me, but as an ex-gallery journalist (aren't they all?), he was very skeptical of my aims and my assumptions. He argued that politicians know that everything they say will be under scrutiny, and are therefore scrupulous about their facts; that political parties are transparent as a matter of course; that journalists never take a press release from a political party at face value, without checking the facts for themselves.

I am pleased to report that I hit this trifacta with Mr Gerry Brownlee.

Brownlee said in a press release:

National Party Energy spokesman Gerry Brownlee says he understands that Labour's emergency stand-by power generator at Whirinaki is running flat out burning up to one million litres of diesel every 24 hours."

That's not true. 93.5% not true, actually, if we take "running flat out" as meaning "operating at 100%". According to Contact Energy, operators of the Whirinaki power plant, it was running at 6.5% of its maximum output in February. In January, it ran at 2.3%. When questioned about his claim, Brownlee said:

I think you'll find, when you see the figures, that it's running at something like 16 hours a day at full speed."

So "16 hours a day" means "16 hours every day"? Not the way Brownlee is using it. The figures show that it ran for 16 hours on a day - on one single day, that is - and only at full speed for 11 hours. When presented with the figures, Brownlee backed down further. Kinda.

With all due respect – we can terminate this interview if you want – but you've got to sharpen up a bit here. These people are trying to put a bit of gloss on a very big turd. The deal here is that yes, across a month, it might have only run for 3% of that month. But there were days, there were hours, and there were other batches of time during that month where it had to run otherwise the lights would go out. It's an emergency plant. It doesn't run unless we're deeply in the shit. I can't put it more clearly to you than that."

Pure. Gold.

According to Kieran Devine, General Manager of System Operations at Transpower, Whirinaki kicked in because the hyrdo generators were trying to conserve water for winter. That's to say, if the demand for power went up further than it did, or if Whirinaki didn't run, the hydros would have kicked in again. The lights would not have gone out.

But the system was also tighter than usual at that time, said Devine, because power plants were taken down for maintenance to ensure that they were ready for winter, and the Huntly power station couldn't operate at full capacity because the river (which it uses for cooling) was too hot. During winter, when power usage is highest, these problems will disappear.

Then he says that:

Genesis boss Murray Jackson told the [Select] Committee that at winter peak the North Island would be 1000 M/Ws short of supply."

No, no he didn't. According to the Genesis Energy spokesperson, the 1000MW figure refered to the capacity that went when the Pole 1 interisland cable was taken down for maintenance and the New Plymouth power plant was closed. These were things that everyone in the industry and everyone on the Select Committee already knew about, and didn't mean that the North Island was 1000MW short of supply.

--

Brownlee's mistake could be excused if the National Winter Group – a group of industry experts that includes members from Genesis Energy – didn't release a report earlier in the month outlining the situation. They looked at a worst case scenario, in which we experienced a one-in-twenty-year high demand, a one-in-ten-year low in generation, with Pole 1 remaining completely useless. If this happened, they expect that we would still have 348MW of reserve capacity left, but we would be vulnerable to major faults. Since Transpower brought Pole 1 back at half capacity last month, we could survive the worse case scenario plus a major failure without industrial users having to cut back.

But even under a worse-than-worst-case-scenario, with the biggest power generator failing and Pole 2 going down as well, it still wouldn't get close to 1000MW. Not only did Brownlee misunderstand Jackson and demand government action without checking the facts, but he claimed something that flew in the face of common sense.

As for the Whirinaki claim, that's even more preposterous. If, as he says, Whirinaki was the emergency, last resort power plant, and it was running flat-out, that would mean that we're constantly at maximum capacity, and that one more lightbulb would send the system crashing and burning.

That's clearly a completely unreasonable claim, given that the lights are still on. Someone who didn't get that should not be trusted to become the Minister of Energy.

--

This was, by no stretch of the imagination, a big story. Brownlee didn't get a heck of a lot of traction with the original story. It did, however, get onto NZPA, the NewsTalkZB wires, and (I think) Radio New Zealand. Each of those stories were pulled straight off the press release, and none of them had comment from Contact Energy (or anyone else, for that matter).

This is the degree to which politicians can get away with making shit up – as long as the story is not major, they can make a claim and get it through to readers unscrutinised and uncontested.

--

On Saturday, I hung out with the new student media crowd at the Aotearoa Student Press Association conference, where Nicky Hager spoke about, among other things, the political PR machine. He spoke about the difference between tactical PR (getting individual stories out or responding to events) vs strategic PR (framing specific issues or whole elections; e.g. making an election about tax).

I've been thinking about the kind of "aggregate PR" campaigns that we've been seeing, most clearly, in the "slippery Key" campaign.

It's obvious that the whole point of the campaign is to use the words "slippery" and "Key" together as many times as possible. The individual instances where it's used are usually inane, occasionally ridiculous. But it doesn't matter. This kind of tag-cloud politics relies on repetition and repetition alone. Therefore, each individual claim has far less value, the quality of the claim has less relevance, and there's little point in rebutting the claims, since it's only the culmulative effect that matters.

It's fucking stupid. But hey, it's what the spin-doctors ordered.

It begs the question: Is debating actual facts completely pointless when, according to our learned spin-doctors, it's all about the frequency of keywords?

We'll see.

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