REVIEW: Richard Meros Salutes the Southern Man (Comedy Festival)

Politically Aware and Intelligent Humour, now with Bonus FlyBuy Points! [by Rosabel Tan]

Richard Meros and Friends!

These are tough times. There’s the global financial crisis. Climate change.  John Key. And Richard Meros, once a leading academic specialising in Helen Clark’s specific niche – can no longer earn a living. And so he turns to the world for a solution, and finds it in that lone figure staring across the plains: the Southern Man.

As with On the Conditions and Possibilities of Helen Clark Taking Me as Her Young Lover, Meros, played by Arthur Meek, uses a gorgeously rendered PowerPoint presentation to convince us of his thesis in inspired and imaginative ways. Drawing on visual jokes, live-action shadow puppetry and a short-lived bout of pyrotechnics, Meros explains in bullet-point form his search for the Southern Man, the figure he believes will be our modern-day hero.