Raybon Kan is an old hand at stand up, and though he seems slightly tired on opening night, he maintains complete confidence in the face of an oddly reticent audience.

Consistently (and a little irritatingly) playing with his microphone cord, Kan delivers a series of gags in the style of a shameless yuppie and under the vague theme of “other people are dumb.”

While there are moments of brilliance in Kan’s show, they are not continuous, but in pockets. A stronger narrative thread or a more cohesive theme would have served well to avoid the moments of dead air between completely unrelated jokes.
When Kan is being clever it really works. He is never apologetic about his opinion – even when the audience doesn’t seem to be coming with him, and expresses his views with a confidence that seems more genuine than a stage persona. But his show is an odd mixture of politics, observational comedy, cheap gags and smut.

In order to segue more successfully between the ingredients, Kan would do well to form a pattern, thus asking his audience to keep up with him, rather than being forced to pick them up again with each about-turn.
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It’s his first show in Auckland since whenever his last one was, years ago, and Raybon Kan has … developed. No longer the nerdy young idealist, he’s in his thirties now and things appear to be more important to him nowadays.

He claims to own us, being his audience, and feels a connection to the crowd given that to be able to afford to go out in Auckland city we must be loaded, like him; Raybon wears his well-off yuppie ego on his smartly tailored sleeve. 

I confess I find the bigotry of affluence shtick refreshingly original in an industry commonly populated with irreverent down-and-outers and hard working family folk. The ‘comedy yuppie’ persona was up for grabs and Kan has proved worthy of its throne. It’s also nice how he elevates his audience to his admittedly misguided level of superiority rather than indulge in the cruel mockery other popular comedians favour. 

As a performer, Raybon swings widely between lethargic indifference and earnest outrage; never quite losing composure, never fully gaining it. 

Many topics are touched upon as he spends most of his hour preparing to start the show, though as he explains himself early on there are a couple of main threads to the show: the government is dumb, and religion makes no sense. These notions alone would be unpardonably offensive to some people, but as most seasoned comedy punters are long since used to such heresy he finds other ways to go too far. 

In true stand-by-your-millionaires-club-alumni style Kan’s heartfelt entreaty to think what it must be like for poor old Tiger Woods echoes Chris Crocker’s famous YouTube blog in defence of Britney, without quite actually losing the cool he never quite had to begin with.

With precocious observations about anything ranging from texting while driving, Facebooking, carbon footprints particularly in relation to tourism, suicide bombers, Zionists, the Pope and even the big JC himself are subject to Raybon’s verbal dissection. It’s not always nice but it’s usually funny.

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