No One Puts Briney In The Corner

We do seem to be repeating ourselves a bit this year with the comedy festival. It’s a bit of a NZ Comedy Festival Greatest Hits, with artists that we’ve liked from previous years. So far we’ve seen Paco Erhard and Alice Brine, and later we’re seeing Tessa Waters and Penny Ashton. We will manage to see some new stuff, honestly (not least, Mr. & Mrs. Alexander earlier in April).

Alice Brine has come up in the world since we saw her last year and has now appeared on Seven Days, New Zealand’s topical news quiz, a couple of times – definitely a sign that you’ve arrived. Her new show has moved down from the upstairs Dome, where we saw her last year, to the main Propeller stage.

First up, a spot of dinner. We decided to visit our friends in Vista as we’ve not been there for dinner for a long while (we usually patronise them at the weekend for lunch). They do a short menu of well-cooked bistro-style food.

Alice Brine’s show, Nobody Puts Briney In The Corner, starts with a short film in which her face is superimposed on that of Jennifer Grey from Dirty Dancing, and also some shots of her trying (and failing) to perform some of the moves from the film.

And then we’re into the show proper. Alice introduced us to the three main events in her life since we saw her last: moving to Auckland (she’s a Hutt girl originally), an associated change in her relationship status to single, and Becoming A Feminist. She became a feminist by accident last year, when a Facebook post she wrote “went viral” as the marketing kids say. That is, it was shared many times over and reached a much wider audience than she was expecting. This led to her gaining a lot of followers who, no doubt, expected more of the same from her.

This was the status:

Alice has spent the best part of a year trying to live up to expectations so that she could use this material in her show…with some varying results. She detailed these to us in, er, detail. And as last time, she had us in stitches with her pithy observations of human behaviour. Especially her own. Everything from asking for permission on a Women’s March, free toilet roll and some distinctly sketchy dating decisions get the treatment. And for the final instalment, treatment was definitely needed.