Comic relief for smokers

Press, 8 March 1984, Page 9

Comic relief for smokers

If you are a smoker, do you get annoyed with antismokers twitching their noses and using emotional blackmail to try to get you to stop? Brenda Kendall, an Auckland comedienne, takes up the cause of smokers in one of the skits she is performing this week in the Christchurch Festival cabaret. “The skit is a touch absurd, really. I say that smokers smoke because the Indians need the money from tobacco,” she said. Ms Kendall takes a dig at some social situations in her other skits as well. One of her characters is Mona Pavlova, an overweight ballerina who claims that “fat is beautiful.”

Ms Kendall says, predictably, that the biggest thrill she gets from performing is seeing a roomful of smiling faces, although she likes to involve her audience as well.

“Everybody has a different concept of comedy. I like having the audience to do a bit of thinking themselves,” she said.

Ms Kendall has been performing comedy for a year. She has done some acting as well. She has had bit parts in the Australian television programmes, “The Sullivans” and “Prisoner,” and has acted in an episode of “Mortimer’s Patch.” She has managed to cram 53 jobs into her 34 years, including a day chipping rust off the bilge-hold of a ship. She says it is getting easier for her to get on stage and relax, although most of her performance is

set pieces. “I am not experienced enough to get up there and just blat, but if the audience gives me something to work with then I will,” she said. Her worst experience as a performer, she recalls, was when at a club in Sydney she performed routines, which normally “brought the house down,” to a stony silence.

“The only laughs I got was when I told a dirty joke,” she said. In spite of their apparent lack of interest, the audience still gave' her a standing ovation after she rather hurriedly finished the performance.

Ms Kendall said there was a dearth of female comics, which she could not understand, as they were as capable as men at it. “I find that if you do something which is a bit unusual, people say ‘What is it like for a woman to do this?’ I imagine it is just the same as for a man.” Most of the material Ms Kendall performs is her own, although three of her skits were written by Paul Little, an Auckland writer. As well as performing at the festival cabaret at the Town Hall this week and at the Dux de Lux, she will perform skits for an episode of “Kaleidoscope” which is being filmed here during the festival.

Ms Kendall said interest had been revived in comedy which was. good for performers like herself.

“Throughout the world there has been a comedy explosion, and it is drifting over here,” she said.