We were a "carefully selected" small audience for a delightfully quirky evening of reminiscences from cult comedian Dan Brader of his parents’ shambolic relationship. Being a boomer was only part of the problem of Dan’s dad’s life, spent concentrating on career and money; none of it was good. But the laughs were simply because they were highly cringeworthy.
Reducing his father to being a 70-year-old paper boy, watching as his peers gain solid careers in supermarket chains, become tokens of Brader’s own success. A storyline a lot of us, boomers or not, can relate to. Being proud of being a 35-year-old paper boy scoring with "Mrs Gray" over a shared love of apples and Robbie Burns; luxuriating in his father’s embarrassment at being seen by Richie walking the streets of the wealth-riddled Wanaka, where personal promotion and staying at the top of your game have become an omnipresence and necessary evil; the guilty joy of deriding "Red" because of his clean-cut determination with supermarket trolleys; Mavis’ egg borrowing, her inability to be truly conciliatory as the hand of retribution claws out from the grave. But marital abuse should remain unfunny.
Part of the cringe Brader embodies is the realisation that the role of social commentator entails always being on the outside looking in and taking entitlement from being cast in the role of perennial misfit. Too much insight into human vagaries and guilty pleasures becomes the gift of an education in humanities.
But the world needs more analytical derision. These are the uneasy topics society can best grapple with by having a laugh at itself, its pretensions, its acid-tongued misanthropy. Dan’s dad makes an excellent target. But what of Dan’s mum growing up in Invercargill? Mind how you go now.
