36. Reflecting On My First Ever Stand Up Tour

In this episode I reflect on the experience of my first ever stand up comedy tour. In October 2023 David Correos and I did a 20-show new material tour around most of the South Island of New Zealand. This sort of thing is very uncommon in NZ even amongst professional comedians so I wanted to share my thoughts and feelings about this incredible experience while they were still fresh in my mind. I talked about what went well, what could have gone better as well as the whole ton of stuff that I learnt from being on the tour.

It was such a good experience and to have it go off as my first ever touring experience makes me feel very lucky. I look forward to doing it next year again! (Spoiler? Maybe!)

I will do an episode with David on the show too, but for now I thought I'd like to do one solo to help process what we did.

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Transcript

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of Rattle Me This. I am your host, the leader of the hack parade, Taylor Ruddle. I'm back from my month long comedy tour with television comedian extraordinaire David Correos. And I'm here to tell you all about that experience from my point of view. So stay tuned. Okay, so now that we are into the podcast proper, I thought I would just talk for a little bit about my experience on this comedy tour, which was my first ever proper stand-up comedy tour. I'm not even sure really where to begin with talking about this. I want this to be as interesting as possible for the average listener of the show, so I don't want to make it too much inside baseball. I also do want to have this episode as a sort of a record for in a few years when I might want to listen back on it and reminisce about my first ever proper comedy tour. So I think I'm going to talk about what went really well, what I learnt and then what could be done better next time. So just before that, I should give a big shout out to somebody that came to the very last show on the tour. and actually told me that she was a podcast listener. So May, if you are listening today, shout out to you. It was lovely to meet you. Thank you so much for listening. And it was awesome to meet you at the last show of the Comedy Tour. On top of that, I have to give a massive, massive thank you to David and to Richard from Notorious Management because they were the ones that kind of gave me this opportunity in the first place. And this tour was like a special kind of lightning in a bottle. It probably wouldn't have happened without the three of us coming together and fulfilling different roles. But even still it absolutely would not have happened if it wasn't for those two. So once again, massive thank you. I don't think I'll ever be able to repay the kindness that you've shown me. So we'll start off with the good stuff from the tour. Um, first of all, it was a, an insane, learning experience for me. I've never been lucky or motivated enough to attend the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, but I understand the way the Edinburgh Comedy Festival works is you perform your show 25 or something times over the course of a month. And I remember hearing Daniel Sloth say on a podcast somewhere that doing the Edinburgh Festival once was the equivalent to taking your So that's kind of the scale of how quickly your show progresses by doing so many shows back to back to back. We did about 20 shows in, I think, 10 venues and pretty much everywhere in the South Island, except we couldn't find a venue in Invercargill or Blenheim. So we had to miss those. But sounds like we're going to do the tour again. So if you're listening in either of those two cities. I would say there's a pretty good chance we're going to come back your way next year. And the thing that was interesting about this tour that people might find interesting too is the idea of a work in progress tour or a new material tour as we were calling it is something that's very uncommon in New Zealand. Not a lot of comedians not a lot of comedians even have done a similar tour like this. um let alone doing it with new material so it was definitely something different for people to experience. From what I've heard in America the way they tour their stand-up comedy is it's kind of understood that the comedian is going to be working on their new set as they're touring it around and in England I think it seems to flip-flop I from what I remember being told it all centers It apparently was people would write their show, they would do it at the Edinburgh Festival and then they would tour it. But I've heard from different people that apparently now the idea is to bring a polished show to the Edinburgh Festival and have it kind of ready to go by then. We don't have, I mean we have the New Zealand Comedy Festival here in New Zealand, but it's still very rare of a thing for somebody to write a whole new show. tour that around and then cap off the tour with a visit to the International Comedy Festival. So I don't know if this means anything to the listeners, but what we did was a very unique thing for New Zealand Comedy. So I'm really proud of the fact that it all came together and we honestly didn't have a single bad show in the entire tour. That was the thing that I was most nervous about was some of this new stuff was going to start off a bit rocky, but even from the first show, just listening back to the recordings, they were still so much fun. And I don't ever remember having a night where I felt that was a tough night at the office. We definitely experienced a lot of different types of audiences from people out in Kerwi. who I think for a lot of them, it was their first ever time coming to a comedy show and didn't really know what to expect. We had an audience in Queenstown who were mostly a group of co-workers and it seemed like they were just looking for something to do that night. They weren't necessarily there for the comedy, that just kind of happened to be happening on their night out. And then you had a lot of audiences that were very comedy savvy. and they watched things like Kill the Tony or other comedy podcasts and were actually giving us really surprisingly good and in-depth feedback about some of the jokes. But I think the best thing about it is not a single one of these crowds were a bad crowd. Everyone was just absolutely lovely. So I think that speaks more to the calibre of person that tends to be a fan of David Carrillos than anything else. If you're checking the podcast out because you heard me plugging it during my set, welcome aboard. You were all absolutely fantastic to perform for and I would gladly do it again. One of the things that I often hear about doing the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is because you are performing so many times you apparently hit a wall where you start to almost hate your own show and I've heard that can be increasingly demoralizing especially if you're performing a show that you're sick of. to a small audience who are like not really giving you much to work with in terms of response. And I think for David and I, we started to hit some of that fatigue at about show 13 or 14. That was definitely when I started to feel like I was a little bit sick of the jokes. And we discovered some tricks to try and keep it fresh for ourselves because I think a big element of what makes a new material tour so much fun is that there is a lot of joy in the early days of the tour when all the jokes are new and they're fresh and they're exciting. So we started doing things like swapping our set lists around. David was opening the show by doing all of the jokes that he was afraid to do right at the top of the show. I myself was chopping and changing. I would quite often move the heaviest hitter... to the front of the show so that I couldn't rely on that to end the show with and had to end with something else. The other thing that I realized, and there was a fantastic phrase that David used when we were talking about it because one of the great things about this tour and just a long comedy tour in general is that these long drives, these several hour drives, three, four, five hours in the car with another person. you get into some really deep chats about the craft of stand-up comedy. And I actually feel like these chats are almost as valuable as all the stage time is they're reflecting afterwards and being able to give feedback to each other in a sort of safe environment and allow yourself to change the show based off of the feedback from the drive. And so the thing that David said was He said that stand-up comedy, the best bits, all contain a universal human truth, which I thought was, it's really stuck with me this whole time here. And what I noticed is at around this kind of 13, 14 show marker, some of these bits that I was doing, they actually kind of, if I'm going to use a video game analogy here, it's like they were at the level cap. They were about as far as I could take them with the current premise. So, If you've seen the show, you'll know that I did a lot of talking about ram raids around New Zealand, well, around Christchurch mainly. And the thing with these, this routine is it can only go so far being an observational piece of like, what's the deal with ram raids? So then what I realized I had to do was I had to ask myself, what actually am I trying to say when I'm talking about these ram raids? And I discovered that the core of that piece was about my desire to be like a cool, like a bad boy, if you will, like a cool, dangerous, you know, like a James Dean leather jacket, motorcycle, pompadour, like a cool, like a rebel, I guess. And then so once I realized that was actually what I should be focusing on with this joke. I could suddenly go a lot deeper and talk about more about myself. It became more personal to me. It became less of a talking about something that's happening and more about this universal human truth because I'm sure there are a lot of guys out there who weren't the bad guy. They weren't the cool edgy kind of little, you know, dangerous guy. And they have a fantasy of being the cool bad boy. every now and then. So that was a huge, huge step up from my performances was seeing how far I could take these jokes and then almost doubling back, digging a layer deeper and then there's a whole new wealth of area that you can go to on the second layer, which is a lot deeper. Performing with David was also really good. for me, especially because David is such a good, he's such a performer in the way he does his jokes. He does voices, he does act outs, he moves around a lot. And this is not something that I've typically been known for with my comedy. So that's another area that I feel that I've definitely leveled up in was with my act outs and my physical aspect doing voices, things like that. in the set that talks about a face that I make when I'm spacing out and how creepy this face looks. And it involves me just making the creepy face and then sweeping the audience making the creepy face and basically silence. And the idea of that was terrifying to me at first to literally say nothing and just make a face, hoping that they're going to laugh at it. But to my surprise, it actually works really well. So I was very proud of myself for getting out of my comfort zone there and trying a new type of joke. Well, not a joke as such, but trying a new way to make people laugh. And I was forcing myself to do the face for longer and longer each show in order to kind of get myself out of my comfort zone. Because as we know, any performer worth their salt knows that that's the only way to really grow is to get yourself out of your comfort zone. And then that way, you will cauterize yourself and you'll become stronger as a performer by making yourself, not giving yourself a choice, but to rise to the occasion. Just to balance it out, I might talk about other couple of things that were tough, that could have gone better, and then we'll sort of flip-flop between good and bad, we'll kind of sandwich it, I guess. So one of the things that was a real struggle for the two of us was some of these travel days were very, very long days. The first day, was driving from Christchurch to Wanaka, which is about five hours and you have to go through a mountain pass, which is quite windy and not a lot of fun to drive. Following that, we had a show that night. Then the next day we drove about two hours from Wanaka to Queenstown where we had two shows that night. And one of my least favorite days on the tour was when we arrived in Queenstown. So the thing about this tour is we did it in October. As of the recording of this, it's the last day of October. And what I didn't realize was that October is the school holidays here in New Zealand. And so when you book these things, we booked them so far in advance, I almost didn't really think about what was going on in the world when all these events where I was just so focused on trying to get them booked in, I didn't even really think about what else was going on. And this will come back to Nelson as well. But yeah, the middle of the school holidays, we arrived in Queenstown and it was... Absolutely just chock-a-block. So I've never seen Queenstown this busy before. The last time I visited was right after the pandemic, so it wasn't really popping off. So a combination of school holidays, summer, and then also there was just road works everywhere. So we pull into town after, you know, coming off a long travel day the day before, two hours in the car. All I wanted was that moment of being able to put my bags down in the accommodation and then just chill out a little bit before the show. Couldn't find a single place to park. The place we were staying at didn't have any parking because we were in a, it was like a motel but we were in a hostel part of the motel so they didn't have parking with it and it was a whole thing. Easily the most stressful day of that leg of the tour because I just didn't know what to do. But I found myself getting a little better at... about dealing with problems as they arise, which is something I've struggled with a little bit in the past where I, if something goes wrong, I get a little bit like, I get a little bit stuck in it and I just want to complain about it and have a little moment where I'm angry. But on this tour, even though this was a bad thing, it still gave me the chance to work on the idea of prioritizing. issues. So what we did in the end was David wanted to go to the gym. So I dropped David off at the gym. And then I drove out of the town centre about 10 minutes out just to find somewhere I could park for a second. And then I thought, well, because really all we needed to do was collect the key from the accommodation and then we could come back at any point. So it was a good chance for me to realise, okay, what can I control now? and what is a problem that doesn't need to be handled right now. And so I figured out we don't need to find a park for the car right now. We can worry about that later. All we need to do is get the key for the accommodation and then we can just go straight to the venue and then we'll figure it out later. Hopefully when everything's quiet and down and everybody's gone back to, gone back home or gone back to the accommodation and stuff. So that's what we did. I picked up David from the gym, dropped him in at the reception of the accommodation, we got the key, and then we just went straight to the venue, did two shows that night. And then thankfully, by the time we got back, the street that our accommodation one was a lot clearer, and we could actually park on the street right next to the accommodation. So again, putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, giving yourself no option but to rise to the occasion is a good thing for personal growth. And I feel like I definitely got a better handle on stress management because I didn't, you don't have a choice. That's the thing. You just have to, you, you know, me having a breakdown in the middle of the day is not going to serve anything. So, uh, you leave yourself with no choice, but to solve the problems that you can solve and move on, come back to the problems you can solve later. Uh, the other thing, we had a very similar experience in Nelson. The, the Nelson travel day was a disaster. Um, If you're not familiar with New Zealand, the way you can travel from Christchurch to Nelson's, you have two options. You can go up through the middle of the country, the kind of spine of the country, and you go through a mountain pass known as the Lewis Pass, or you can go up around the coast, go through Blenheim, and then you end up in Nelson. Going through the Lewis Pass is about an hour shorter, but the problem is you are at the mercy of the weather and... For some reason, they had snow in the Lewis Pass on the morning of the day we were supposed to drive up there, even though we're in the middle of summer. We're in the middle of summer? We're in summer. But yeah, the Lewis Pass was closed. So we took the road up around the coast of the country, and that added on about an hour. We had to stop and, you know, toilet breaks and get snacks and all that kind of thing. So we left town at about 10.30. and we didn't pull into Nelson until five o'clock when we had to be at the venue in Motueka, which is another 40 minutes away from Nelson because I figured it would be easier to stay in Nelson and then drive to Motueka for the show, then drive back to Nelson. What ended up happening is there was an arts festival happening that day and there is like a town square, kind of, it's like a market parking lot. kind of hub area right next to our accommodation. So I was hoping we'd be able to show up, leave the car there for a minute, get checked in, maybe get some food, drive leisurely to Montschuaca, but no such luck. We roll in, there's no parking in town, because I think as well, I think there was a protest for the free Palestine thing that's going on at the moment. I could hear like chanting and stuff on the street. I think that was also happening, but. So many streets were like cordoned off, road cones. It was just absolute chaos. So again, I just said, David, can you just go inside and get the key? We'll worry about this later. He did so. We drove to Motruka. We arrived about 20 minutes after we were supposed to, but thankfully that show was absolutely fantastic. Funky little, cool little venue. My favorite thing about doing comedy road trips in New Zealand is you get to experience these little independently owned, funky, cool, sort of weird artsy little theaters that hold between 50 and 100 kind of people. They're usually volunteer based and the seating is always great. There is always mismatched couches and everything. And it's just one of my favorite things about gigging in New Zealand. Like if you're a If you're an aspiring comedian and your goal is to play big theaters, this might not appeal to you so much. But if you are, I highly recommend you just book yourself a little tour of all these weird funky little theaters around the country. They're just good fun. I love it so much. But getting back to what I was talking about was the travel. The travel is hard, especially because I did all the driving on our tour. I was kind of the roadie as well as well as the performer. That was fine though. I think I definitely overestimated how, sorry, underestimated how much the travel was going to take it out of me. Because once we were in Dunedin, we were both really zapped. David was struggling with his voice a little bit. We don't know whether, we don't think we were sick because like, We didn't get each other sick or anything, but we would just run down. And one thing that saved my butt and actually helped David a lot was we were drinking these electrolytes that you mix into water. And, um, I think it was like day three or day four. Um, David had really been not feeling too well the day before. Soon as he drank a bottle of these electrolytes, it was like he came back to life. It was like, it was insane how much it helped. And I suspect. That's probably what kept me going to an extent as well, was just staying hydrated. I also discovered a new appreciation for these mints called a fisherman's friend. I've had this annoying sort of dry cough for God knows how long now, months, which is a lot of fun when COVID is happening and you constantly feel like you've got a cough. But my local pharmacist suggested that I try some like Manuka honey drops or fisherman's friend or something like that just to keep the saliva. flowing in your mouth and that's been a huge help. I'm a big fan of the old fisherman's friends now. Something else as well that you don't often think about when you're booking a tour like this is the difficult schedule of the way hostels and hotels want you to be out at 10 in the morning, but you can't check back in until about three o'clock. So you have this weird gap where it almost feels like you just can't, you can't quite get enough sleep. And then you've got a whole big chunk of the day to kill to check in again. And it's just another factor on the tiredness, I think, is that along with the long days, you're also performing sometimes twice a night. And then you've got to be up at like eight to get up, have a shower, get rid of the check out. And yeah, it's all just quite relentless. It just wears you down. It was when we were going through that, that I really appreciated that my style of comedy, it's a lot more. soft spoken and less energetic because I think that's what it means I didn't need to exert myself as much on the stage. Dave uses a lot more energy, he's a lot shoutier than I am, so I really felt from some of those nights when he was having a hard time with his voice. So back to a good thing, it was um it's kind of all related I guess but I really feel like I leveled up through this experience of going on tour. David taught me so many things, just little things like vocal warmups or little bits and pieces you can do with your, the way you deliver lines or do voices or pointing out things that we're good to lean into. And I just like it's a really cliched expression, but I really do feel like I left this tour a boy and I'm coming back a man. Well, man child, you know how it is. And it's not just in the onstage thing as well. David gave me so much wisdom about how to stand out when it comes to like almost branding yourself. He dropped a great line that I, this was an eye-opening thing for me because we've been talking about the type of audiences that tend to come out to comedy versus the ones that came out to David's shows. and David's audience is a lot younger and just cool. They're just lovely people. And he was talking about, we had a lot of talks about fashion and about how you dress kind of projects, how you dress projects to other people what you are, what kind of person you are. And he pointed out at one point that my style was kind of like a Reddit admin, which that was like. That was way too close to the bone. But I'm really glad he pointed it out because it made me think like, oh, geez, is that like, is that the vibe that I give off? And then is that kind of the vibe that I want to come back to me? Like, no offense, if you are a Reddit admin, I hope you still enjoy my, if you still enjoy my comedy, but I don't wanna be pigeonholed to just that uber nerdy kind of, bloke dude basement dweller sort of vibe. So because of that, Dave actually took me shopping, helped me pick out some really cool nice new things to my wardrobe. He actually pointed out as well, I have this checkered wristband, which if you've watched my COVID joke special, you'll see me wearing it. And he just pointed out that I should lean into that look because it feels very like former alt kid or emo, whatever the whatever the expression is, which is always something that I've always liked, but I never kind of thought I never thought to present myself in that way. So I think if you see me at the next coming shows. You'll probably be able to see that I'm making more of an effort to look nice on the stage like on the last couple of shows in Nelson, I had a nice pair of black chinos on, Dave helped me pick those. I still had my New Balance sneakers on, I need to get some new shoes. So obviously with the leaning into the emo thing, that's going to be Vans or Chuck Taylors, I guess. The only thing is I've got terrible pronating heels, so I need to, I need to see a podiatrist too. So there's a lot of work to be done, but I think I'm really, really grateful of Dave for helping me think about this stuff more and realizing that it actually does matter what you wear and how people perceive you. So the, yeah, come out and if you come out and see a show, hopefully you're going to see a more stylish Taylor Ruddle. Hopefully looking a bit better than the old Reddit admin look that I tend to. I tend to currently go through life wearing. I've actually just been out looking, trying to find some new checkered wristbands. I wanted to find a little more variety, but I think time has passed me by a little bit. And that wristband that you'll see me wearing at the shows, I've had that since year 11 in high school, which is, jeez, 12, 13 years ago. So I'm actually surprised it's managed to hold on this long and hasn't degraded or anything like that. I'm getting real off topic here. This is what happens when I don't have a co-host to keep me on the straight and narrow. I don't know, I hope you're enjoying this podcast. I'm kind of just, we are going to do an episode with David where we talk about the tour because I'm really curious to see what he took away from it. I know he, it was so bizarre because I think we used to go through nights where I would feel like I had an off night and I would watch David just absolutely destroy and just think to myself, geez, I'm not working hard enough. But then I would later learn. that on other nights he was having the same experience of watching me do really well and thinking that he wasn't writing hard enough. So the grass really is always greener on the other side. But yeah, we'll, I think we'll definitely get David on to talk about what the experience was like for him. But I felt like I wanted to just do a solo for this one, as it was a little more intimate, I just wanted to kind of talk directly to you to the listener. So I hope you're, I hope you're enjoying it and I hope it's not. I hope that this isn't too inside baseball for you. When Stephen Lyons said the other day that it was good to get my perspective on leaving my job so early before I've kind of quote unquote made it. And he thought that was a really valuable thing to talk about. Cause you don't often see people in these in between stages of like figuring out everything. And that's something I've always kind of flip-flop between wanting to be as transparent as possible with, you know, my quote-unquote fans. Still feels weird. Still feels weird saying fans, but you know what I mean. The people who follow my nonsense. And I think I take that from being such a big fan of the way Brandon Sanderson interacts with his audience. And I feel like you do lose a little bit of your mystique as a performer. by being so candid and talking about everything in such detail. But then I just look at the trust that Brandon Sanderson's fans have with him and the fact that he could make that amazing Kickstarter go off. And that was all just built off the back of having such a transparent relationship with his fans. That's seeing that kind of thing that makes me want to do more things like this where I talk about the nuts and bolts of what I'm doing. I really hope it's interesting to you. So what was that? That was a good thing. Now we'll go to a tougher thing. This wasn't a bad thing as such, but for me being the opening act to a more established comedian was sometimes a interesting experience and could be a little bit of an uphill struggle at times because the way we formatted the show was that David would come out at the start, he would do the introductions and kind of say hello to everyone. set the room, then he would bring me on and then we'd either have a break and an opening another local comedian would come out and do something and then I bring David on or I would just bring David straight on after me. And there were definitely shows where the vibe to me, this could well just be my insecurity coming out, but the vibe felt like that they didn't really want as much of me as I was giving them. Like they would have been happy with maybe 10 minutes from me and then they're just the rest from Dave. And again, could be my insecurity just making it feel like that was the vibe coming back. But I mean, that's what it is. What it is, right? They don't have any reason to know who I am. But then on the other hand, you could have these. I think we really blew people away at times with just how tight of a show it was for a new material show. And for only $20, a lot of people told us that was really cheap. And you know, someone, a friend of mine who came out, she said she would have paid $40 for that show, but that's the thing is we wanted to keep it as accessible as possible so that young people could come out and enjoy the show. And it really worked because man, the average age of the audience was like 25 or 30. It was, it was a really young, um, like slice of the demographic that came out. And that was like, it worked perfectly. That's exactly what we wanted to happen. But yeah, then for me, I sometimes got to have this delightful experience of people not really expecting much from me, and then me kind of blowing their mind a little bit with how well the set went. And we had a lot of people that were like, quite shocked that I was a local like a Christchurch guy or something. So in a sense, that was a really fun satisfying thing for me to get to kind of wow people a little bit with, you know, don't get me wrong, I did have some, I did have a... A few of them were like, it wasn't wall to wall laughs, but on the ones that went really well, I could kind of feel the energy was like, geez, who is this? And then also like, we were not expecting it to be that good. I think that's always been one of my ethos is to under promise and over deliver. I'm not a big fan of the approach of promising everything and then under delivering. I feel like it's a lot better to do it the other way. The reverse catfish. So yeah, that wasn't necessarily a negative thing. But at some shows, it just felt like halfway through my set, I could feel some of the audience going, right, let's wrap this up and get you out of here and then bring Dave on because we want to ask him about Taskmaster. I guess this leads into the next thing. Not necessarily a good or bad thing. But It was fascinating to see what people knew Dave from. And the majority of them were from the TV show, Taskmaster, which I imagine if you're listening to this, you're probably a comedy fan and you're probably familiar with Taskmaster. If you're an aspiring comedian who wants fans, that should absolutely be your prerogative to get on Taskmaster, as that was like by far the most common thing. The people would just yell at him, are you the guy from Taskmaster? Like, a lot of people didn't know his name, but a lot of people would just be like, are you the guy from Taskmaster? And this is going to be something that if I ever do anything where people are recognizing me on the street, I'm going to have to work on my people skills because David was just so good and he was so patient with people, especially when we'd be out and about and someone that was maybe like had a few too many drinks was maybe a little too comfortable with like... just touching him or something like that, like, you know, without even really asking permission. But yeah, no, he's just watching him interact with people was quite eye opening for me, and that I'm definitely going to have to work on my people skills, because I can just imagine myself reacting poorly to people just yelling something at me or something like that. So yeah, that was, that was, uh, it was really cool to see because I've known Dave for a long time and this is one thing you learn. You learn about your place in the world by how shocked people were that I was doing a tour with David. Like I had people that would message me and be like, Oh my God, how do you know David Correos? And I'm like, I've known David for a long time. And they'd be like, yeah, but like, he's on the TV and like, yeah, okay, stop rubbing it in. Like enough of that. Like, um. And so yeah, David, if you're an overseas listener, David is one of our television. So he's sort of on the like the upper, he's definitely in like the upper level of, of our television celebrities. I think even he would agree that he's, he's not quite in the like tippy top. But man, if he's doing this kind of tour every year, it will not be long at all before he's just like. uncontested one of the best comedians in New Zealand. I hope he doesn't mind me saying that. I don't even know if he's gonna listen to this episode but if you're listening Dave, hello, thank you. I think I've basically got everything out there that I wanted to talk about from this tour. This podcast is gonna serve as a little bit of a just to get it off my chest kind of experience I think. To wrap up I might just go through what we did just in case I'm listening five years from now and I want to remember so the first week of the tour... We did one show in Wanaka at Ryman Rees in Brewery. Absolutely delightful little brewery there. Their merch game is really tight. Then the next night we went to Queenstown and we did the Searchlight Brewery. We did two shows at the Searchlight Brewery. The thing that absolutely blew my mind about the Searchlight Brewery is it's up on this kind of hill and you're looking at the sign from the kind of parking area and there's just one of the most beautiful mountain faces. up in the distance behind the sign and I got really struck by just the beauty of Queenstown and because I mean they call that mountain range the Remarkables and the more time I spend down there the more I understand why they call it that. So the following night we went to Dunedin, Dunedin one of my favorite places to perform in the whole country. I think it's like the second biggest town in the South Island. So we had four sellout nights there at Inch Bar, this really cute little bar that seats about 25 people. And yeah, we could have done probably like a whole week of shows just in Dunedin. And I imagine we would have sold out everything. The crowd there were awesome. They totally got what we were doing. And they were just, they're really comedy savvy crowd down there. They made a few days off. Then we did. I'm going to get really muddled with my what we did and when, so I'm just going to list what we did in Christchurch. We did a Wednesday night at Five Stags Rung Eora. We did a Thursday night at, geez, this middle two weeks because it was all around Canterbury, I'm a bit muddled up with it. We did a Thursday night at Austin Club, my usual Thursday night haunt. We did a Friday night of two shows at Austin Club. We did a Saturday night in Rolleston, I think. That was a really fun little crowd. It was in the Rolleston Rugby Clubs. Dave was really, really nervous because I think any performer knows a rugby club gig can be quite a rough night at the office. But I mean, it was David's audience. So they were all absolutely lovely. It was such a fun show. We did a night at Thirsty Acres in Kerwee, which was, I think I mentioned before. I don't think they get a lot of stand up out that way. So they were a little bit worried, but I think they really came around and they enjoyed it. We did a night at Little Andromeda and that was the night I was nervous because that's so far from my world. I'm not really the sort of artsy act that tends to do stuff at Little Andromeda. So it was a completely new experience for me, but it was so much fun. It was so good. I had a lot of old friends and family in the audience to support me that night, which was like really surprising and kind of... I almost thought maybe that might have the audience might have been 50-50 maybe some of them were there for me. No, I'm not that delusional, but I did have a lot of support in the crowd that night, which was great. If I missed some I do apologize my heads. That two weeks was a bit of a mess. It was all around Canterbury and I was still trying to coordinate quizzes and stuff in that same time. And then the last week we did a Spriggan Furn Merrivale, which is again our usual Thursday night haunt. absolutely fantastic little show there. Dave had so much fun. Full House just, it sold out weeks in advance. It was just amazing. I was so not stressed about the lead up to that one. It was incredible. Then we had our tough travel day up to Nelson, had an awesome show in Motua Oka. I felt so comfortable on stage in Motua Oka. Lovely little crowd. And then finally, two nights in Nelson who were just incredible. They were such good crowds. It was the perfect two shows to end the tour on. And I think they probably got a pretty good deal for money. They probably got a pretty tight couple of shows there. So that was the tour, my first ever big boy comedy tour with David Correios, proper TV comedian. So I think we're going to leave it there. Check in next week as we might have, well we're back to normal for next week I believe. I haven't quite decided yet if we're going to do part two of Henry Hickman's survivor episode or if we might play an interview with Tracy Royce, who is a paranormal investigator. So it'll be one of those two. I'm not quite sure yet. And I've been this this, I don't want to say too much about I don't want to set the expectations, but I so I recorded every single set that I did on this tour. I have all 20 shows in audio format. And so what I'm doing now is I'm scraping through these shows and I'm clipping out little bits and pieces that weren't going to make, they aren't going to make the final cut of the show. Crowdwork things, little stuff that just happened in the room. And I'm going to make a special bonus episode, which is just all the cutting room floor stuff. So if you only attended one of the shows on the tour, or if you couldn't make the shows, but you want to experience. some of what it was like. You can listen to this and hopefully you'll get a laugh out of it and it'll let you experience some of the joy that we had doing this tour. All right, I'm going to wrap it up there. Thank you so much for listening. If you're a new listener coming from seeing me on the tour, I appreciate you coming along. I hope you continue to listen and I hope I'll see you next year at one of the festivals. I think I can talk about this now. but I've decided on the name for my Fringe Festival next year. It's going to be Panic at the Buffet. As you can tell, I'm leaning into the emo thing a little bit more there. I'm definitely doing the Dunedin Fringe. I think it's like the 20th to the 23rd of March, something like that. That week we're down in Dunedin. And I'm just about to hand in my application form for the Nelson Fringe. So, fingers crossed, I get in there, and that will be the week previously up in Nelson. So... check out those two fringe websites to see when my tickets go live I'd love to see you at either of those shows. As always Taylor Riddle comedy on all social media platforms, check out Can Do Comedy to see the regular events we got coming up, two quiz nights a week plus Laugh Seller or Sprig and Fern on Thursdays. Thank you again for putting up with me really appreciate your listening we'll catch you next time and I hope you have a wonderful week.