Rhys Mathewson - The Best £10 You'll Ever Spend

• Suzanne Black
• 16 August 2013

This article is from 2013.

Value for money applied to comedy by the New Zealander comic

Hailing from New Zealand and looking like a cross between the country's two national species (sheep and hobbits), stand-up Rhys Mathewson is very concerned about money, or the lack of it. In a conglomeration of titbits about his life, loves, homeland and burgers, he loosely connects the dots using the theme of value for money, promising to demonstrably earn the £10 ticket price.

To track his success, he has a nice little contrivance to measure how much comedy bang for their buck the audience is receiving at any time throughout the show. What at first seems like a gimmick adds an extra dimension of reflection to proceedings, as the crowd are inspired to work out how much any particular laugh is worth.

The pennies soon come rolling in and his laughter stock increases with self-deprecating jibes, tales of inadequacy and a few cultural comparisons. In other words, standard fare. A good sense of audience-reading, deprecating charm and the aforementioned scoring system allows him to present material that is not out of the ordinary in a novel way.

Pleasance Courtyard, 556 6550, until 26 Aug, 7.15pm, £10.