Everybody knows that you do not sit in the front row at a stand-up comedy show. Comics have to make fun of people. After they have ridiculed the politicians and other celebs, they have to humiliate someone in the audience – and the easiest targets are those in the front row.
Everybody knows that you do not sit in the front row at a stand-up comedy show. Comics have to make fun of people. After they have ridiculed the politicians and other celebs, they have to humiliate someone in the audience – and the easiest targets are those in the front row.
Everyone knows this, so if you go to this type of show you want to be near enough to be able to see nicely, but you definitely don’t want to be seen. Tarryn Liddell knows this, but she had no choice.
On assignment for Cue newspaper, the daily Festival publication, she had to sit in the front row in order to take photographs. Oh, what a terrible assignment she took on, to be a sitting duck at the Mark Banks show.
He picked on her relentlessly, hauled her up on to stage, made her take photographs of him and the audience and never let up during the whole show. He teased her, insulted the esteemed newspaper she represents, sneered at the Great Hall where the show was taking place and mocked everyone in Grahamstown.
And the audience loved it. They were in stitches for the “full 83 minutes, including the standing ovation”, as Banks put it. Of course they laughed like hyenas all the way through because they weren’t sitting in the front row, and the overwhelming majority weren’t even from Grahamstown.
It is a waste of space to describe how funny Banks is, because everyone knows he is hysterical. He improvises brilliantly, manages to appear supremely relaxed yet be as sharp as a razor at the same time.
You are never sure how much of what he is saying is true – he told the audience his house in Johannesburg had just been ransacked; how much he had carefully scripted, “who writes this crap?” he asked; or how much he had just made up on the spur of the moment.
Banks is to be congratulated on doing an entire comedy show barely a week after the ANC Youth League congress, without even once mentioning Malema – something few comedians are able to do.
He did however, launch a few broadsides at monstrously obese politicians babbling sanctimoniously about their concern for the hungry people of this country. That is fair game – and a great show.
