Last year, comedian Joseph Moore wanted to be a billionaire. The year prior, he was a Billy T nominee. 24 years before that, he was born. And how lucky we all are that he was. Moore is a brilliant young comedian. He’s funny, slightly awkward, and has a bright future in New Zealand comedy. 

Moore’s musical knowledge and talent is a staple of both his material and his style. It’s continually impressive, and incorporated with genuine purpose in his shows as opposed to simply being there because he’s so good at it. [More]

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With humblest apologies to Joseph it behoves me to confess that, due to some schedule confusion, we arrived twenty minutes late for the show.  We enter to a consistently laughing half-full house as Moore is mid-anecdote talking about radio hosts and ISIS, and it takes no time or effort to catch onto the train of hilarious thought. 

I’ve seen Moore previously, performing in comedic plays he’s co-written and presenting Auckland theatre’s awards show ‘The Hackmans’ with his regular offsider Nic Sampson, as well as on TV’s Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby back in the day.  1989 is unlike any of those; it’s a stripped-down, back-to-basics one-man observational comedy hour, and a solidly entertaining one at that. 

Sharing a varied number of his life experiences thus far, like any non-self-respecting standup, he tends to dwell on the more ironic, perplexing and downright traumatic moments that have shaped who he is today.  He’s a serial long-distance relationshipper, so to compensate for the loneliness he spends money on stupid shit like [spoiler averted]. 

He has as we know had some success in comedy, but it’s an uphill battle impressing his own family, standing as he does in the shadow of the worldly wit of his South Island beer-drinking truck-driving Uncle Phil.  There’ve been a couple of near-death traffic experiences too, giving rise to the existential dilemmas inherent in such near-tragedies. 

For all these reasons and more, Moore has a darkly witty take on the world that rings with cynical truth and a heaped teaspoon of self-deprecation.  I don’t know what we missed but I’m sure it at least partly concerns Taylor Swift, as referenced in the title and ratified in the gloriously pseudo-surreal musical finale. 

Moore and a gaggle of his plucky young local comedy compadres play the Montecristo throughout the festival.  It’s a brilliantly classic seedy but comfortable dive kind of setting, perfect for the talent on offer as they convincingly prove the home team can cut it with the best of them.

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