Jack McGee
This Glass House Makes It Easy To See All The Cowards I’m Throwing Stones At, while a mouthful, is an apt title for Guy Williams bizarre and dissonant stand up special. Williams spends the hour putting himself and the world on blast in seemingly equal measure, positioning himself with an odd blend of hubris and vulnerability. Self deprecating comedy is nothing new, nor is socially conscious humour, but the way Williams wades straight into the deep end, openly admitting that he won’t be making it out unscathed is a sight to behold.
Short of the Conchords, Williams is about as famous a comedian as you can get in Aotearoa. He crosses demographics, being blokey enough to appeal to the more masculine ‘apolitical’ crowd, alongside the gruffer older millennial demo, while being blatant enough in his leftist politics to bring in the Wellington young millennial/zoomer audience. He’s 36, which was a shock to me, as I permanently visualise him as a teenager in the body of someone in their late twenties. Point being, he’s been around a while and knows his way around a room. He quickly identifies that the crowd in Te Auaha’s Tapere Nui theatre is a weird one. You’ve got a mix of drunk hecklers, real adults with day-jobs, and us very nervous capital W-Wellingtonians. There’s a great moment early on where Williams is telling an anecdote about his brother marrying a Jewish Woman and converting to Judaism, and he feels us tense up in politically correct anxiety. “Chill out guys!” he erupts, “It’s not like he joined the Israeli Defense Force.” The laugh that follows is massive, and you can feel the room relax.
This is the balancing act of the show, Williams has to make sure he positions himself enough on the audience’s side that he doesn’t come across another belligerent white man when he starts making jokes about tougher subject matter, namely suicide. While I’m initially heavily off put by him going there, he makes a strong case for it, discussing how all the other white male comedians he knows view suicide as the one real taboo because it’s the issue that “actually affects them.” His jokes on the subject are all targeted, and while there’s still a few that rub me the wrong way, it never feels fully in bad taste.
A key part of making this dynamic work is the audience needs to feel empowered in it. Williams is encouraging of his hecklers, and works to cultivate a room where the audience feel like they can happily get one over on him. He’s good natured but witty and often brutal in his responses - it’s a little like the cool dad messing with the kids. Early on, he also argues for our right to be offended by him, going off at all the boomer-nutters who say “everyone is too easily offended nowadays.” He argues that the most easily offended people are actually stand-up comedians, who get so defensive when someone calls them out for making an offensive joke, that they go on warpaths as a result (Dave Chappelle being the key example, Williams tells the story of Chappelle’s career in elaborate depth, admittedly to the point where it feels more like Williams’ roman empire than funny to the audience).
His encouraging attitude towards hecklers makes the show if i’m honest, as a particularly rambunctious audience member sitting in the rafters gives him near endless material, even hitting him with an “up brah” (“what’s up brah?”). There’s a group of more passive audience members at the front who get a few good digs in as well, even calling him out for having his fly down, making Williams’ well defined on-stage implosion all the more joyous to watch.
To be clear, there’s a lot of swings and misses here and while that’s the point of the show, it doesn’t mean I personally think they’re all defensible. There’s a couple of slurs said in context that I don’t personally feel are necessary for the intent to read and occasionally Williams will over do the self-deprecating thing and I’ll think I don’t need you to clarify to me that you’re being an asshole here, I can put that together myself.
But look, Williams knows how to play to a room, and he’s a remarkable stage presence. Loud, brash, but always engaging, it’s a joy to watch someone this vibrant run away on various tangents for an hour. If you’re anywhere in the wide-reaching Williams demo, I’d seriously recommend checking the show out and throwing a few stones at him yourself.