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  • North & South

    NEW ZEALAND BOOKS

    Sep 08, 2019 4 minutes
    edited by PAUL LITTLE

    Funny As. The Story of New Zealand Comedy

    Paul Horan and Philip Matthews (Auckland University Press, $50)

    She’s a hard road finding the perfect way to write about comedy. Try to be funny and you’ll be unfavourably compared with your subjects. Resist all temptation to humour and you’ll be accused of producing something ironically dry given your subject, LOL. The latter option, however, is the safer course and has been taken here.

    This is more correctly the story of New Zealand humour than of comedy, covering not just performers and performances but columnists, novelists and cartoonists. It’s “the book of the series” (recently screened on TVNZ), and it’s not clear how the two align.

    It’s by no means complete, and naming

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