Stand-up comedy doesn’t have to be all heckling and being mean. Ray Shipley tells Cityscape about putting on an accessible and welcoming show with plenty of laughs.

Tell us about the Cosy Comedy show you’re putting on at Little Andromeda – how did that come about? Cosy Comedy is a gentle comedy show for nice people. We’ve got two rules: comedians can’t pick on the audience and the audience can’t pick on the comedians. Emma and Brendon came up with the idea a few years ago to offer an alternative to the ‘absolutely anything goes’ flavour of stand-up shows – that can be a lot of fun, but there’s a bunch of folks that could feel a bit put off by that.

Is cosy wear encouraged? It’s the start of winter, so cosy wear is certainly encouraged from a health and safety perspective if nothing else. Cosy Comedy hasn’t got a dress code – the cosy comes from the feeling in the room, and the mulled wine Little Andromeda has got going at the moment. But wear cosy wear if it makes you feel good.

What have been some highlights of collaborating with Emma Cusdin and Brendon Bennetts on this project? For each Cosy Comedy, we run a small workshop ahead of the show to go over everyone’s material and offer encouragement and ideas and kōrero about comedy. This process is a real highlight for me – it’s so wonderful to bounce ideas off each other and spot all the ways we three compliment and clash with each other – those moments are where the jokes get real weird and good.

Comedian, writer, poet – are there any other hats you wear on the regular? My only other hat is my day job. I’m a librarian, which kind of relates to the rest, I guess! It’s a pretty great job, and it means that I can and will give an enthusiastic book recommendation to anyone that’ll listen.

What is it that you love about poetry, and who are some of your favourite poets? At its best, poetry does all the same things that I love about comedy – it can be whip smart, hilarious, and devastating simultaneously, all while connecting readers and audiences to each other and to ideas they might be able to see themselves in, or have never thought about before. Favourite poets is a hard one, because I have so many. Right now I’m re-reading Tusiata Avia’s most recent collection, which just won the biggest award for poetry in the country. She’s incredible.

We understand you’re a bit of a hand at crochet – whipped up any particularly impressive creations lately? Not really! I had to put a bunch of projects aside to furiously crochet a number of hexagons and pentagons as a prop for a show Emma and I did a few weeks back for Comedy Fest - google ‘happypotumus’ to see what I’m talking about. As a result, I’ve got three unfinished socks and an incomplete waffle blanket to pick up again now the madness of fest is over.

What do you like about performing at Little Andromeda? Little Andromeda feels so safe and fun, which makes it easy to experiment and be playful. I think I’ve done some of my best performances at Little A in its various forms, and that’s down to the community and culture they’ve worked hard to create there.

How do you think the Christchurch theatre and performance scene stacks up on a national and international scale? My sense is that Ōtautahi is at a very exciting turning point – starting to thrive after a number of years of struggle post-quake. I’m excited that there’s new places popping up to perform in like Little Andromeda and Good Times Comedy Club, and I’m excited that performers from the rest of the country are including us on their circuits when they have new work. But I’m still pretty fresh to this! I don’t know the history, and I don’t have heaps of national or international experience to compare it too – I just know that I love living and performing and being an audience member in Christchurch right now.

Any shows coming up that you’re particularly looking forward to? I’m so looking forward to WORD Christchurch festival in late August. Their lineups are always so diverse and inspiring, and I can’t wait to see what they’ve got in store this year.

If you could invite any three people, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would they be? Usually I’d find this question very difficult, but with current travel struggles, if I could have my sister who’s in London, and my in-laws who are in Melbourne round for a dinner party tonight, I’d take that over a brought-back-from-the-dead celebrity I reckon.

littleandromeda.co.nz