Comedy Fest Questionnaire: Jonny Potts

Comedy Fest Questionnaire: Jonny Potts

1) Tell us what your show is called this year?  Let Us Reappraise Famous Men

2)  Why? I came up with the title a year and a half ago, before I'd read Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and let it guide the development of the show.

3) Can you give us a few hints as to what broadly your festival show is about? It's about men we look up to and men we perhaps should look up to. And a couple we shouldn't. Everyone from politicians to artists to sports stars to landscape architects. 

4) How much time have you spent crafting the show over the past 12 months since the end of the last festival? 
After I came up with the title I realised a lot of the stuff I was doing was consistent with it, so some of the writing had already been done. Some of it goes back to the very first stuff I was doing on stage. The ideas have just kinda been filtering through, punctuated with these occasional bursts of gag writing. Which helps, what with it being a Comedy Festival show and all.

5) The comedy festival is turning 21 this year – it’s a big age 21 – what are your memories of being 21? Or if you’re not old enough yet, you lucky person, what are your hopes for being 21? I was living in Whanganui staying up late, falling in love, smoking cigarettes and trying to see what folks saw in prog rock. Bliss it was that dawn to be alive...

6) The Comedy festival is one big party and catch up for a month - is there anyone you’re looking forward to seeing over here either socially or on stage?
I'm mostly looking forward to what the Auckland folks bring down to the capital. And like every sane person I want to be Josie Long's flatmate. I don't know her but she grinned at me in 2008. And she liked one of my tweets once.

7) What’s the comedy scene like at the moment who do you rate and why?
It's really healthy, and I'm looking forward to following some promising Wellington performers over the next few years, people like Eamonn Marra, Alice May Connolly, Cam Miller and Rick Threlfo, who are so totally their own people on stage. Also, Binge Culture collective have been responsible for some of the best and funniest theatre in Wellington over the past few years, and they're going from strength to strength. 

8)  What’s the best piece of audience interaction you’ve had? 

A toss-up between a really aggressive heckler I destroyed about six months into doing comedy, and a night in my Fringe Festival show recently when the AV screwed up and the whole mood changed to one of 'OK folks, we're all in this together, HERE WE GO!' That was serious fun. 

9) What’s the most memorable part of performing for you within the last 12 months?
The last night of Good Times with Cool Dudes, the split-bill NZICF show I did with my brother-from-another-mother Hadley Donaldson last year. The night had this great energy. We dedicated it to MCA, who'd died that day. Then we went and saw Tommy Ill play and I was apparently quite rude to someone and if you're reading this I'm very sorry. But YOU should be sorry for using the word 'gay' to disparagingly describe my draw-string bag.

10) When we say New Zealand International Comedy Festival to you, what’s the first thing you think of? I really have to nail down how I'm going to open this show.

11) How would you persuade people to come and see your show?
Just look at the amazing poster. I know it has to be good.