School of Roque:

James Roque (centre) and his friends Pax Assadi (right) and Jamaine Ross (left) take a tour of small-town New Zealand for the TVNZ reality comedy series Frickin Dangerous Bro...On The Road. Sarah Nealon reports.

Comedian hits the road for a tour of small-town New Zealand.

Comedian James Roque got the wrong idea about New Zealand thanks to something he saw on television as a child in his birth country of the Philippines.

“The only thing I knew of New Zealand was from this one milk commercial that aired in the Philippines that was shot here,” says Roque who moved to our shores from the Southeast Asian country when he was eight years old.

“But it was not representative of what real New Zealand was at all. It was this mother and daughter frolicking in like the meadow and cows drinking water from streams. That’s what I expected New Zealand to be.

“When we arrived here and went to Pakuranga I thought, ‘What the hell is this? This is not what I was expecting’.”

That was 20 years ago and these days Roque crops up on television in his capacity as a comedian.

He has appeared on 7 Days, Have You Been Paying Attention? and Jono And Ben. Now he is starring in Frickin Dangerous Bro...On The Road, a series in which he and fellow comedians Pax Assadi and Jamaine Ross visit small New Zealand towns to meet locals and perform stand-up shows.

In the North Island, the trio visit Wairoa, Feilding, Kait ia and Ng ruaw hia while in the South Island, destinations are Hokitika, Motueka, Oamaru and Ashburton.

“I think there’s a reputation about small-town New Zealand that it’s, for whatever reason, not very inclusive or whatever, but we wanted to disprove that,” says Roque.

One of the first towns the comedians visited was Feilding where they encountered a football team with refugee and migrant players.

In the Manawatu town, Roque, Assadi and Ross also got to know a woman working in a takeaway shop, visited a second-hand store and wowed a local audience with their comedy act.

“I think Feilding was actually one of the rowdiest shows we had,”

Roque. “I remember being backstage, before we did our live show, and all three of us peered through the cracks of the doors and just saw the audience from the back.

“It was a sea of grey hair and it was all mostly white people.

“We were like, ‘Oh s**t, we’re about to tank the show right now. They aren’t going to get any of our stuff’.

“But then we went out and it was great. It challenged our preconceived notions about the town.”

Roque, Assadi and Ross are all individual comedians in their own right but also perform as a collective under the name Frickin Dangerous Bro.

The group’s name was inspired by an encounter Assadi had with a police officer.

“What we like to actually say is that it’s an ironic name because we’re the least dangerous people. We’re very lovely,” says Roque.

“It’s a line from a story that Pax told us once that made us laugh for months.

“He was caught speeding by a cop and the cop was trying to guilt him into feeling bad. So he just kept muttering under his breath little lines to try to make Pax feel bad for speeding.

“One of them was ‘Frickin dangerous, bro’. He kept saying it under his breath.

“I remember Pax telling us that story and Jamaine and I were just in stitches, and it kind of became an in-joke for us.”

Before they decided to form Frickin Dangerous Bro, the comedians got to know each other via the local comedy circuit.

“At the time when we first started comedy, it wasn’t super diverse,” says Roque.

“It wasn’t the diverse line-up you see now and, so for us, it was kind of like, ‘Oh another brown person in the green room. Sweet. I’ll talk to you because I feel uncomfortable right now’.”

While Roque is from The Philippines, Assadi was born in New Zealand to refugee parents. His father is from Iran and his mother is from Pakistan. Jamaine Ross is P keha M ori. As Frickin Dangerous Bro the trio have hosted their own podcast, performed on stage and appeared on television.

“For some reason, we’re able to find a commonality in trying to make comedy in a mostly white industry,” says Roque.

“We kind of found a camaraderie within that.”