Eli Matthewson: Daddy Short-legs

Despite being a minor celebrity in his homeland – a former voice of New Zealand tourism no less and the third most famous graduate of his school – Eli Matthewson isn’t as secure in his identity as he might have hoped.

For a start, he is still coming to terms with not being the most famous graduate of his school. And granted, on stage he has got the relaxed charm and droll, anecdotal skill of a young John Waters, packaged with the best teeth that cosmetic dentistry can buy, not to mention the confidence in himself and the foresight of a Mad Max-style apocalypse to sport a brazen mullet.

Yet despite noting the double standards that wouldn’t apply to a heterosexual comic, he was perceptibly stung by a producer’s suggestion that he dial down the gay jokes on television. Blessed with a name both madly Biblical and gendervague, society doesn’t allow him to forget his homosexuality when he and his boyfriend are renting holiday accommodation for example.

Still, Matthewson was up for the challenge, conceiving his latest hour as being a gay-joke-free zone. Unfortunately, life has a way of throwing a spanner in the works and the Kiwi was forced to again re-evaluate his identity after a family revelation.

Realising that there’s still time for an old dog to learn new tricks, he reasons that being defined by homosexuality maybe isn’t such a bad thing. A bodged but graphic expression of the love between he and his boyfriend that went viral on the internet at Christmas apparently afforded him some much needed perspective.

Presented rather more neatly than the messier aspects of his story suggest, Matthewson largely keeps a lid on the emotional fallout of his tale.

But it’s absolutely there beneath his bemused, flawless smile.