Henry Yan won the 2023 National Raw Comedy Grand Final at the Melbourne Comedy Festival – his third year in standup. He has many strengths. He has created a solid character based closely on himself. He rarely uses the word “awkward” but that is the theme as surely as if it were written in three-metre-high lighting across the back of the stage.

In his fifth year he is not known so well in Wellington, playing Te Auaha Gallery. I am sure his audience sizes will increase. Yan’s audience work is very skilled; also brave and engaging. His core awkward characteristic has a huge potential for jokes. Bombing is not a bug but a feature. His pathos is off the scale. My feeling is that his character is only a small modification of his true self. He elicits empathy.

Jacob – an audience member we get to know quite well – cannot help himself from laughing at the pathos of the joke bombs, and there are many. Jacob’s laughter has a magical quality that somehow communicates love not scorn, and we laugh with him.

Parallel to that, awkwardness means being edgy is laughed off as poor social skills. His character is a license into some extreme territory, such as suggesting a threesome with two lesbians in the audience. This goes down brilliantly, not awkwardly. He has made that much of a trusting connection.

We see a very solid 30-40 minutes, but after that time I feel the need for some story arc, some sort of message. I think Yan has yet to fully realise this area of development. There is the beginning of it present in the show. Yan’s weaving together of his material, with the seven different audience groups he is engaging with, shows strong storytelling skills. He also foreshadows one of his final scenes a few times – when he first told his mother he loved her. Chinese-New Zealand family members working out how to say I love you to each other is the drama in this show. But it is the coffee, not the main course.

I will definitely pay to see how his story unfolds next time he is in town.

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