Comedian Chris Parker is excited to deliver Auckland audiences some much-needed laughs in an encore run of his hit 2016 stage show Camping. Photo: Supplied/Andi Crown Photography
When it comes to comedy, the stage will always top the screen, Auckland comedian Chris Parker says.
"To be in that room beside people and laughing with them, it's just so much better than watching it half asleep on your phone with your hand in a bag of chips."
For an encore run of his smash 2016 show Camping at Auckland's Silo Theatre, Parker is rocking an "almost medieval" bowl cut and as much of a moustache as he can grow.
"I will give you everything. I will cut my hair, I'll grow a bad moustache and I'll be an idiot on the stage for almost an hour and a half because I want you to leave filled with the best feeling I can create."
Camping is on at Auckland's Silo Theatre from 14 November to 7 December. You can find details here.
Parker wrote the raunchy couples' comedy - which is about actors 'camping it up', not actually camping - with fellow comedian Tom Sainsbury, who he describes as a dear friend with a very similar worldview and sense of humour.
"I think everyone has a friend that once one of you goes, you delete the text message thread and Tom's that friend [for me]."
Parker says he and Sainsbury wrote Camping as a pastiche and homage to campy shows they love like Are You Being Served?, Kath and Kim and French & Saunders.
'Camping', starring Brynley Stent, Tom Sainsbury, Chris Parker, and Kura Forrester, is showing at Auckland's Q Theatre from 14 November to 7 December. Photo: Supplied
While New Zealanders think of themselves as very dry people, our love of these shows, '80s cooking duo Hudson and Halls, The Graham Norton Show and The Topp Twins reveals quite a camp sensibility, Parker says.
While some lines were cut from the new version of Camping and some new stuff added, the play's examination of monogamy and New Zealand's cultural prudishness is still relevant eight years on, Parker says.
When Silo Theatre first floated the idea of bringing the show back, he and original cast members Sainsbury, Kura Forrester and Brynley Stent were 100 percent in.
"For us, there's no better feeling than to be able to do this together."
The Camping cast is happy to deliver audiences some much-needed escapism at the end of the year, Parker says.
"The world is so tense and I think it's important that we take our minds off that. We just want to give the audience a really good time and it doesn't seem like hard work. It just feels like such a gift and such a pleasure to be able to do it.
"When I'm out there doing comedy I'm just like 'This is my only true purpose in life'."
For Parker, even the political news can deliver laughs via quirky human behaviour.
"My latest obsession is Speaker Gerry Brownlee losing patience with a haka in parliament. He just goes 'No, don't do that'.
"Even though it's a really tense moment there's something underneath that that I still think can be satired and I think it is important to satire this stuff sometimes."
House Speaker Gerry Brownlee was visibly frustrated when a haka led by Te Pāti Māori interrupted voting for the Treaty Principles Bill on 14 November 2024. Photo: RNZ
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