Tim Batt Saves Planet Earth could only have been created in New Zealand. 

Admittedly, there are moments throughout the show where influences from around the world seep through. He asserts that Colonel Sanders was a slave owner because “he can feel it in his guts”, which immediately brings to mind Stephen Colbert’s unparalleled performance at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. He raises his voice to a high-pitch when he lies and whispers into the microphone when he’s sentimental – vocal techniques that are most common with comedians that are camp and British. But despite these influences, Tim Batt always pulls his jokes back into a distinctly Kiwi comic rhythm.  

It is the same cadence that you hear in John Clarke’s Fred Dagg or in the work of Paul Ego, and it allows people like Tim Batt to point to issues in our democracy without ever seeming too political. It is a voice that is simultaneously definitive and humble, and that finds wisdom by avoiding the over-complicated.

Batt gets Ryan from the front row to read out admissions of fear from the audience at the start of the show, which allows him to build a rapport with the audience. He tells us we need to build this rapport if we’re going to achieve our goal of saving the world – a clever move at a stand-up gig. Similarly, when the audience seems to disapprove of a joke about an infertile woman, he takes this discovery of the audience’s moral compass as a successful discovery that we’ve all made together as a team. 

Perhaps the cleverest move Tim makes is taking his closing joke from last year’s Unified Theory show and putting it right near the start of this performance. This is what Louis C.K. did every year when he decided he could fight to become a great comic rather than a good one. It forces the comedian to come with an entire hour of material that is better than, or on par with, the best thing they came up with the previous year. If Tim Batt keeps it up, I am certain he will have a long and successful comedy career.

When Tim Batt’s show opens with a loud video telling us all the reasons the world was falling apart – a video that includes George Bush as one of the reasons we were doomed – I feel sure his show is going to be a series of brash, outdated jokes. I am wrong.

Tim Batt’s performance is a professional display of a non-professional Kiwi archetype that covers everything from his inability to make a move on Jess when he was fourteen, to the many reasons “our planet is fucked”. 

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