Could you do it? Could you not check your phone for an hour? Just let those emails, texts and social media notifications beep away at you while you resist, wondering. With our universal obsession with our devices bordering on a mass addiction, Kiwi stand-up Guy Montgomery is going to do it.
“Certainly, first things first, the show does what it says on the tin. I will be resisting any desires to check said phone,” he says of his brand new show, Doesn’t Check His Phone For An Hour.
“In essence, it’s a stand-up show thematically driven by a relationship to my phone,” he says. While he will analyse how and why this happens, Montgomery will be tackling other topics as well. “Isolation and getting older, removing yourself from your comfort zone and finding out that might not be the smartest thing to do. I’ve always wanted to move to New York and in doing it, I did not immediately find it to be the experience I imagined or the experience I convinced myself it would be.”
“I have theories on buying fresh produce, the challenges contained therein and then – also tying into fresh produce – different people’s applications of fresh produce and cooking. It covers a bit of ground.”
Now based in New York, Montgomery grew up in Christchurch, went to uni in Wellington and then moved to Auckland. While he gigged there for several years, he actually got his start in comedy in Canada. Recognising that an inherent part of the process of learning the craft of stand up involves being not very good at it for a while, he decided to speed that process up and move to a city with a much bigger live comedy circuit.
“So the logic was I would go to Canada and do essentially a very intensive year of training there,” he says of Toronto, where he cut his teeth quickly by doing ten gigs a week.” The appeal of doing it in Canada was I could do it away from prying eyes and sort of arrive as, if not a finished product, at least someone who’s not an absolute atrocity on stage.”
It paid off, with Montgomery winning New Zealand’s top comedy award, The Billy T Award, in 2014. Doesn’t Check His Phone For An Hour will be his fourth time appearing at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival. In 2015, he did a split bill with Rose Matafeo, the following year he picked up a Best Newcomer nomination for his show Guy Montcomedy and last year he did Let’s All Get In A Room Together. While here, he’s also performing with impro in Snort and Friends, which will feature Kiwi performers plus local and international guest comedians.
Montgomery will do the festival circuits here in Australia and New Zealand before returning to New York in May. “So this, in essence, [is] an opportunity for me to rebuild my bank account and ego before returning to the cold hard streets of America and having it taken away from me all over again.” But at least he’ll be able to check his phone then.
