Craig Campbell’s Thrilling Mic Hunt is an hour long show that feels like sitting through an awkward family dinner with a drunken Canadian Uncle. With a self described “conversational” style, the show sees Campbell stagger through various well-recited anecdotes about his life “on the edge.” Audience participation is encouraged as he directs the conversation through a wide variety of topics from bears to Montreal to Canadian plane testers on Vancouver Island.  

Campbell is a well-travelled raconteur who has a surprising amount of knowledge, guiding the audience through his various trips in a thought provoking and educational manner. The topics seemingly arise organically though it only takes a quick google search to realise that he’s been telling the same joke about taking a Kiwi to find a bear since at least 2010. 

This is Campbell’s sixth year at the New Zealand Comedy Festival but it seems he hasn’t learnt much about New Zealand in the 17 years that he’s been returning here. The one locally targeted story gets some audience approval, as do his rapping skills but there is also an offensive nature to the show which proves too much for the audience at times. 

One punter, who has obviously had enough of Campbell’s in your face attitude, vocalises his thoughts, leading to a shouting and swearing match of epic proportions that causes a dozen or so audience members to storm out with 10 minutes to go. 

But for those willing to brave the crass obscenities, unique observations and vague rants of a Canadian mountain man, this show delivers as promised. Words are only words and it’s Campbell’s ability to shock, engage (or disengage) and crack up an audience that see’s him touted as “one of the most skilled story-tellers and joke-smiths on the circuit.” 

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Scruffy young comedians often sharpen up their personal grooming with age, once they get past the determinedly rebellious stage of needing to prove their own unique independence by not caring how they look.  Not so Craig Campbell. He’s actually more scruffy today than he was twenty years ago championing the great unwashed in the fondly but barely remembered Canadian comedy talk-show he co-hosted (with a sock): Ed’s Night Party. 

Campbell hits the ground running to the sound of rambunctious drumming and within sixty seconds has acquainted himself with a couple in the front row.  Five minutes later he’s scored a tequila out of them, which he reckons hasn’t happened before but being a stand-up comedian there’s no need or expectation to believe anything he says.

No-one who’s been in the game as long as he has could dress this badly by accident, with his unironed muted purple shirt, clashing plain blue board shorts and black barefoot shoes.  The 80s Billy Connolly hair and beard are possibly a consequence of residing in Glasgow, as he has for a few years now, to make it easier to avoid ever having to travel to or even through the gun-centric insanity of the US.

He’s got a story about that – probably several, but this evening he shares a hilariously expounded but ultimately troubling anecdote involving armed robbers and SWAT units, to illustrate his reason for “Getting the hell outa Dodge” (Downtown LA actually).  There’s a definite sense that this show can never exactly repeat itself, as Campbell reacts naturally to whatever seems to come up with his trademark pseudo-spontaneous vociferous raving. 

I say pseudo because it’s clear he’s told these stories before, but just which of the thousands cached in that crazy Canadian cranium of his will out during the generous hour is wholly determined by what comes up in his politely confrontational exchanges with the crowd.  There’s someone in from Finland so he does twenty minutes on Finland.  Others from Scotland, Coventry and Montreal are served up similarly frenzied rants relating to their lands of origin. 

Kiwis get a mention too, inevitably, and being his sixth visit to our distant and diminutive shores in the last couple of decades, his Nu Zild accent is quite passable too.  Here all week and no two nights the same, folks!

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