Andre King slopes on stage, a genuine smile curiously combined with a wry smirk through suspiciously squinty eyes.  He announces upfront that this will be the ‘interactive’ style of comedy show, and demonstrates by meeting me and asking what I do. 

"I’m a reviewer," I say. "Whoa, Jesus, fuck!" says he, and I’m thinking, "Heh heh, that freaked ‘im."  However, he’s not incorrect in assuming that when I was a child, I didn’t dream of being a reviewer.  And therein is part of the point that Andre King really really hopes to convey, so that you really get it, about who we are and what matters in our lives.

At the outset King explains the show’s title is a reference to Bill Hicks’ famous passage about "The Ride" of life.*  For the uninitiated King recites an excerpt, turning Hicks’ set-closing piece into a kind of set-opening karakia… at least, the closest thing to a karakia we are likely to get out of this educated Māori atheist.

Andre has a slow stillness to him sometimes bordering on the glacial, while almost (but not quite) continually maintaining a compelling kind of enigmatic cheek. 

His laid-back treatises expose the absurd wild goose chases that permeate all our lives – politics, advertising, religion… the usual suspects of comedy topics, laden with the irony also familiar in the industry.  But King repeatedly emphasises the truth behind this irony, desperate for us to realise that life is that simple, and far more beautiful than some of us may have noticed.

Within this earnest crusade, King’s humour sparks and tickles, ensuring folks just along for the laughs are getting their money’s worth.  He seems to reach a kind of conclusion a little early, at which point he obligingly fields a request to perform his tried and tested routine on the being an educated Māori.

As for my own position, I have my reasons for reviewing (affordable entertainment, people keep asking me to), but I concur wholeheartedly with King being far more impressed by the woman he spoke to who works in early-childhood education, is fulfilled in her work, and can’t imagine doing anything else.  That’s what he’s talking about! 
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*In recognition of Kings primary interest to have this existential message understood, this is Hicks’ classic speech in its entirety.  Note the frustratingly simple solution in the final paragraph:

The World is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real, because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round, and it has thrills and chills and is very brightly colored, and it’s very loud. And it’s fun, for a while.

Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they’ve begun to question, "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" and other people have remembered, and they’ve come back to us and they say "Hey, don’t worry. Don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride." and we KILL THOSE PEOPLE.

""Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride! SHUT HIM UP! Look at my furrows of worry. Look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real."

It’s just a ride.

But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that. You ever noticed that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter, because … It’s just a ride.

And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear wants you to put bigger locks on your door, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead see all of us as one.

Here’s what we can do to change the world right now, to a better ride:

Take all that money we spent on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding, clothing, and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and WE CAN EXPLORE SPACE, TOGETHER, BOTH INNER AND OUTER, forever … in peace.
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