We’ve been asked by the Onehunga Community paper for information about our shows. This is an expanded version of our reply.
Park Comedy (Initially we didn’t call it Park Comedy, that came a few days later when we decided to run more than one) is a hobby / passion project of Julia & Tessa Clement. It began in Potters Park on 10 November 2021, the first full day that Auckland was on Covid restriction Level 3 step 2 at which point there had been no live, in person, performances permitted in Auckland for 12 weeks.
Our fellow comedians were amazed we’d set it up in 24 hours. We explained that we hadn’t. When the restrictions that would apply to level 3 step 2 were announced we read them very carefully and realised that 12 comedians with 12 audience members in a park with no money changing hands met the requirement of outdoor social events with a maximum of 25 people. In addition, we could do it with sound gear we already had: One mic stand, one wired microphone and we took a couple of old trolley speakers of ours out of retirement. They each had batteries that would last around an hour so half way through the show we swapped them over. The sun provided our lighting until sunset at 8:03 PM which dictated our 6:30 start time for a 90 minute show. We were ready to go and all we needed was for the government to fire the starter’s gun.
We were not new to producing comedy shows. Before Covid we had been running free nights in bars for a few years and produced a couple of Grin Reaper plays. We had acquired sound and lighting gear designed for use indoors. During the lock-downs we had run open mics over Zoom.
During the first season we started running some better quality speakers that we had on batteries and managed to power our audio mixer so we could use wireless microphones. Towards the end of that season we decided to try to push into the Autumn and worked out how to run our lightweight stage lights off batteries. This was coupled with a decision to expand to more parks.
In February or March 2022 we looked for suitable parks for expanding into. We briefly considered Western Springs Park & Olympic Park (New Lynn) before selecting Jellicoe Park (Onehunga), Selwyn Domain ( Mission Bay), Meola Reef Reserve (Western Springs) and Heard Park (Parnell). We both have connections with Onehunga. From the mid 1970s to 1983 Julia’s father worked there & she scored school holiday jobs there for a couple of years. In the early 2000s Tessa was the cook at the Trident Tavern. Gleway is one of our favourite cafes. When we were planning to expand to multiple parks we looked in the area for a suitable park & found Jellicoe. Our first gig in Jellicoe was 20 April 2022. The other new parks were in April 2022. Since then we’ve tried a few other parks, Coyle Park (Pt Chev) has replaced Meola and Te Pai (Henderson) has Heard Park’s time-slot.
We believe the audience likes us because we has a live show that hosts comedians at different levels of experience in a venue close to home with adequate parking nearby. No need to try to find parking in the Queen Street, Karangahape Road or Ponsonby Road areas. As it’s an open mic we can’t control the jokes individual comedians tell and try to discourage people bringing children old enough to understand. It’s also a public park so we can’t control who is there.
We love doing park gigs because it is outdoors in a free environment with no commercial imperative to sell food and drinks across the bar. At the risk of sounding pretentious, “Art.” During daylight savings, some parks’ liquor bans start at 10 PM and we’ve never finished after 9 PM so people are able to bring picnic food and refreshments if they wish. Other parks have different liquor ban times, as we don’t drink much we’re not terribly interested in trying to build and maintain a list.
We’re a true open mic, yes we do arrange a core cast of comedians wanting to practice their act and often test new jokes but we also extend an invitation to anyone who wants to give it a try. We prefer that they register before the night so we can plan but we extend the invitation to anyone in the audience to just let us know they’d like to give it a try and we’ll do our best to fit them in.
We prefer people wanting to give it a go to have 3 to 6 minutes of jokes they have written themselves but can’t enforce this. At one of our gigs we had a gentleman, I guessed to be in his mid to late 70s, who looked like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, stand up and tell some of the filthiest limericks I’ve ever heard 🙁
One downside of being outdoors is if we get rain close to show time or heavy rain earlier in the day we can’t do it.
Our season is nominally December 1 to the end of daylight savings (first Sunday in April) but if summer weather comes earlier than usual we may start earlier, equally if the weather becomes wintery earlier we may finish earlier. We have published dates until the end of February & sometime mid-late February will decide if we will try to continue through March.