"Hyper specifically around that inclination," says Kiwi comedian Guy Montgomery.
On this occasion it is not in order that someone should have to spell it.
He also says "performatively inflamed cultural differences". Also without expecting anyone to repeat it, letter by letter.
But in spinning these phrases he not only sounds very much like himself, as we’ve come to learn from his stand-up performances, panel show appearances and spelling bee TV show, but also evokes another, earlier celebrated voice of New Zealand comedy.
Because they are the sort of eloquences the laconic John Clarke, aka Fred Dagg, might have employed back in his black singlet days, or indeed later on.
And as history would have it, Montgomery is not only the recent winner of the NZ Comedy Festival Fred Award — the Golden Gumboot — for his stand-up show "My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy" but does feel a certain affinity with the much missed transtasman comedy champion.
"I have only actually seen snippets on YouTube," Montgomery (34) says of the gumbooted Clarke.
"I am not familiar with the entirety of the Fred Dagg oeuvre," he clarifies further, not pausing to spell the French, "but John Clarke himself is obviously, just one of the granddaddies of New Zealand comedy. He is timelessly and globally accessibly funny, I think."
Clarke and Dawe, he suggests, and The Games — Clarke’s hilarious send-up of the planning of the Sydney Olympics.
"I think also my dad was a fan of him and certain sentence structures that I use, I think, comedically, through the medium of my dad, are derivative of John Clarke."
And to stretch the connection a little further, both men have found favour on both sides of the Tasman, Clarke settling on the far side and Montgomery now a regular visitor and winner of the top prize at this year’s Sydney Comedy Festival — again for the "My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy" show.
Finding success on the southern continent has been a dream, Montgomery says.
"For all of the, I think, performatively inflamed cultural differences we share or we argue about with Australia, there is a commonality in our sense of humour."
There even seems to be a particular desire to embrace Kiwi comics at the moment — an impulse that is probably not reciprocated just yet by audiences in this country, he says.
But that big green and yellow embrace has been important in terms of making comedy a sustainable career, he says.
"New Zealand, obviously, is my home and my first love but Australia is, on numbers alone, a bigger place."
Further good news for Montgomery and Australia and audiences here too, is that the comedian thinks he’s getting funnier, thanks to "the pursuit of constant self-improvement".
Which sounds serious. And it is.
"My dream is to be funny and it is my favourite thing to be," he says. "But if you try to earn a living out of it, you have to, tragically, take it somewhat seriously."
Fortunately, the growth curve of improvement continues to trend upward, he says.
"I don’t feel it plateauing currently."
Specifically, Montgomery says he’s been honing the art of presenting well-understood phenomena as if discovering them for the first time, and presenting them to the audience as new information.
"There is something again, to harken back to John Clarke, there is something I think," he says, before resetting, "... they are presented as ambling or rambling tangents but inside of them I am trying to present my distinct world view or something that is uniquely mine, these broadly accessible avenues or access points.
"I suppose it’s something to do with the manipulation of language inside stand-up and the way you can take a rote phrase that we all turn over every day and really open it up and walk around inside it and pick parts of it up and look at it. I instinctively just find a lot comedy in that, I think before I did stand-up I just thought it was funny, and it can be fun to deliberately misunderstand things or deliberately mispronounce certain words and extract maximum comedy value from them."
All this fascination with language seems to help explain why Montgomery was drawn to the idea of a spelling bee as comedy, which not only found success on stage but became the TV show Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee.
Certainly letters and words, it is something I am drawn to, he says.
"To be able to discover a television show format that’s built almost hyperspecifically around that inclination is a delight."
The show
- Guy Montgomery performs My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy at the Glenroy Auditorium, Dunedin, Friday, June 16
