It’s the first challenge in Grifted & Talented and the audience is suddenly very invested in whether cabaret performer Lily Catastrophe can draw a Pikachu properly.

There’s a minor genre of festival show where different performers can get together, have some fun and, potentially, show a new audience they are funny and worth seeing. An example from the New Zealand Fringe was Beef Wellington, which assailed guests with pro-wrestling level energy as they played parlour games and improv warmups.

In the comedy festival, Grifted & Talented is set up – by the exuberant show title on a projector screen and the glitter of impresario Jim Fishwick’s sequin jacket – as a glam 70s game show.

The contestants (see here for each night’s cast) are a mix of local improvisers – on opening night, Austin Harrison and Tara McEntee – and cabaret performers, in this case, Lily Catastrophe. Malcolm Morrison rounds out the cast as tonight’s scorekeeper and Fishwick-sidekick.

Contestants have been sharing with Fishwick their party tricks and talents. Simply getting to see those could be passably entertaining in itself but, as the show’s title suggests, there is a twist.

Fishwick’s bio lists work as a contributing writer for Taskmaster NZ and Only Connect. Their interest in translating secret-ridden game shows into live theatre culminated, at least until now, in The Saboteur, an improv format where one player is working to undermine the show – at least, as a good improv show is normally understood – without getting caught. The resulting scenes were flavoured with spiralling paranoia, and second- and third-guessing of absolutely everything, by players and audience.

Disclosure: I was in The Saboteur in Wellington [not the one reviewed above – ed] . I was the least secret saboteur the format had ever seen. So: most of these people are friends of mine but if I tried to lie about them, it would be pretty obvious.

Grifted & Talented, on the other hand, draws most obviously on the personal bluffs and reveals of Would I Lie to You.

A contestant is challenged to do a thing – it may or may not be something they told Fishwick they could do. They earn points if they do it – more for doing it well. A swiftly-drawn and entirely accurate Pikachu earned enthusiastic applause and a full three points.

Later rounds introduced the titular twists*. The player performing the challenge can also earn points beforehand, by convincing other contestants this is a thing they can do – be it by sheer bluff or pure honesty. The ones watching can earn or lose a point by correctly guessing whether the performer can (‘talent’) or can’t (‘grift’) do the thing.

Here, rather than The Saboteur’s ongoing mutual suspicion, the overall stakes are kept low. Each mystery is resolved immediately by the performance, and contestants are left free to enjoy the results and indulge their natural inclinations towards banter or good-natured sledging (it emerges that Harrison has specifically requested to be ‘bullied’).

I suppose a sufficiently competitively-minded contestant could undermine this atmosphere of wholesome entertainment but they would have to work pretty hard.

Grift or talent doesn’t quite cover everything that happens. The show cheerfully allows the intervention of chaos. 

Some initial challenges seem to be formulated to be just different enough from a declared talent to make things interesting. McEntee does not have a history in rhythmic gymnastics. Harrison does not know how, specifically, to play My Heart Will Go On on the clarinet but gives it a good shot. I’m left wondering if Lily Catastrophe has said she could draw a different kind of Pokémon.

And, in the last round’s head-to-head contests, audience intervention to extend the flight of Catastrophe’s entirely unfit-for-purpose paper plane – to beat the distance for Harrison’s perhaps ill-chosen design – is cheerfully allowed.

Every challenge guarantees a spectacle. It’s just a question of what – the revelation of a barefaced bluff, a hilarious and shameless failure, or a genuinely impressive show of talent. Austin Harrison’s ‘a trick with a deck of cards’ has all the amazed reception a magic trick could hope for. Lily Catastrophe undertakes to identify nine songs from her Apple music catalogue based on one second samples – she only misses out on the full three points for failing to remember one title.

The human ability to convince people you are very good at something you are very bad at is, among other things, currently a significant threat to global security. I don’t know if we could direct all of that energy into late-night comedy shows, but late-night comedy shows are certainly a much more fun place to watch people get out of their depth.

And the presence of so much bluffing heightens the impact when a bold claim, probably unrelated to the contestant’s performance history, turns into a genuine show of talent.

All these people are talented. And they are funny and worth seeing.

*This is an opportunity to mention the moment McEntee won the ‘Make Malcolm laugh’ player-v-player challenge with a boob related in-joke from their Dunedin improv days. In under five seconds, beating Catastrophe’s intensely goofy fifteen.

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