Chris Parker: ‘Everyone wants to be a stand-up so you’ve got to be the best’
Saturday, 28 June 2025
Chris Parker remembers quite clearly being banned from dancing in his mother’s good room.
Those long limbs flailing every which way were a hazard. But he did, of course, and those enthusiastic arms knocked some rather precious ornament onto the hearth smashing it into tiny pieces. He was banished to fandango in the garage.
Parker, comedian, author, documentary-maker and stand-up, is still dancing and that’s how you’ll find him if you go to his latest show – throwing some shapes on stage as you enter the theatre before he even delivers his first gag. Dancing with abandon, finding his ‘sparkle’.
It’s all about connecting with the audience from the get-go, he says. Sometimes there are hugs and selfies with the punters. Those first in the auditorium to take their seats are sometimes a little perplexed to see the guy in full boogie-mode.
“I love those moments when the first people walk into a huge theatre and it’s just them and me and they’re like, ‘Oh, are we supposed to be here?’.”
Parker is back in Aotearoa after the Australian leg of his tour, Stop Being So Dramatic!
He describes the show as a combo of rebellion against cringe and the necessity to embrace his passion for all the things he loves. It’s funny, he says. But its genesis was born out of a more serious place.
“I started writing it in February. It was at the time of Pride in Auckland and there was a lot of interesting stuff going down with Brian Tamaki and Destiny Church. It was this feeling like if you stuck your neck out you were being annoying, and yet we were being somewhat persecuted by these people who were sick of our ‘woke agenda’. I know it doesn’t seem like fertile comedy territory, but that was the starting point of it all.
“I was really thinking about this sort of ‘post woke’ era where the term ‘woke’ has become such a loaded turn of phrase that has been weaponised in government by people like Winston Peters, but it is actually about being the most compassionate and empathetic human you can be.”
Parker, 34, says the show morphed into a meditation on everything he loves in this world, his passions, of which there seem to be many, and the fact that you can’t help what you fall in love with.
The show is really about passion, he says.
“There are anecdotes about community theatre and ballet and jazz dancing, and the fact that I gave up on those things that I loved so much because I was cringing about them. There’s this point in the show that is a reckoning – maybe that’s what our enemies are wanting us to do, to cringe at ourselves and give up on the things that we love the most because it’s a way of dimming our light.”
In his early 20s, around the same time he came out, Parker remembers being someone who made a big noise about things that mattered to him. Somewhere along the line he got a little jaded.
“You become really apathetic about these major moments that are happening in your life. So in my mid 30s I thought, no, it’s actually time to plug in and feel more.
“I lost maybe five years. It’s good to be back to being quite a passionate guy.”
Getting back to stand-up feels pretty good too, says Parker, who is speaking from the inner city apartment he shares with his husband, designer Micheal McCabe and their dog, Margo, a rescue hound of uncertain lineage, in Tāmaki Makaurau.
His career runs the gambit, from comedian, author and TV show creator to reality star and Instagrammer extraordinaire. Covid inspired the latter and if you haven’t seen those videos, rush now to do so if you want a good chortle.
But writing for stage and performing live is numero uno at the moment, he says.
After his New Zealand tour he’s taking the show to London and Edinburgh. It must be hitting the right notes because he has already added extra dates to the UK schedule.
“I want to be putting all my focus and energy into my live experiences now, partly because it means that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t own them but I’ve always preferred being a live artist.
“I feel like I’m constantly trying to get better, be funnier. I want my presence out there to be more polished. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to be constantly improving because it’s such a saturated industry. Everyone wants to be a stand-up so you’ve got to be the best.”
Parker is a workhorse, all right.
In the past few years he has written two seasons of the TV series Double Parked, co-created with Starstruck’s Alice Snedden. When Snedden moved to the UK part way through the project, Parker jumped into heading the project writing, showrunning, being on set, working in the edit suite.
There are three TV series in development, and a couple of films.
He’s keeping those projects close to his chest. He’s way too superstitious to spill.
“I can’t tell you any more. What if they don’t happen? I’d be mortified! You can imagine how embarrassing that could be.”
He is still doing his weekly podcast, The Male Gayz, with fellow funny man, Eli Matthewson. The show, which Matthewson describes as an hour and a half hanging out with your best friend with the microphone on, has been going for nearly a decade and even though Matthewson is heading to the UK in a few weeks’ time, the pair plan for the show to go on.
They go way back having met when they were both performing at the Shakespeare Festival and at theatre sports as teens. They became friends, and rivals.
“I’ve had the privilege of being able to see him grow. We were both closeted teenagers growing up in Christchurch and I’ve watched him become much more at home with himself.”
Parker, a “natural born performer” is always striving to be better, he says
“He’s never satisfied … he’s always trying to go bigger, more monumental. I take that as inspiration and a good bit of healthy competition because we’re in the same industry, and it’s good to keep each other on our toes.”
Parker was just a little kid when he started ‘absorbing’ theatre and dance. Growing up in Christchurch with his three siblings (his sister Liv is a comedian too), his parents took him to shows – mostly ones he auditioned for a part in, but didn’t get on account of being too tall, he says.
He was 9-years-old when he saw a harrowing production of The Diary Anne Frank, “which basically altered my brain chemistry. I almost threw up and had to get escorted out of the theatre. I was so immersed in it”.
He was given tickets to go again and see it through to the end. He sat in the back row by the emergency exit and managed to watch the whole thing by clinging on to his parents.
He danced ballet from the age of four. His mum took him to ballet productions as a way to show him men could be dancers too, he says.
“I loved it so much.”
As he got older he gravitated towards a group of mates who would all hang out and wax lyrical about the virtues of Monty Python, The Two Ronnies, French and Saunders, Rowan Atkinson – “I found all that British comedy so funny” – while rejecting the heteronormative sexist American films of the early 2000s, teenage movies like American Pie, he says.
Parker first knew he had the chops to make people laugh during meals around the family dining table.
He developed his funny bone at an after-school drama programme which would put on two shows a year. At Christchurch Boys’ High School he got into theatre sports performing at assemblies doing impressions of teachers.
“We became legends in our lunchtimes before we were humbled back to being those nerdy, loser drama music kids. For a while we were pretty funny and you realise, like wow, people can respect [us] for this.”
When he moved to Auckland he joined improv late-night theatre show Snort every Friday night at the Basement Theatre. Here he found his comic tribe; a cohort of comedians - Eli Matthewson, Laura Daniel, Hayley Sproull, Rose Matafeo, Alice Snedden, Guy Montgomery among them.
Those shows sold out week after week and eventually it went all the way to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
Through that community they formed a sort of voice of comedy that defined an era, he says.
“Comedians emerge in waves. You form a sense of comedy through gigs and lineups performing with people. Even though you are out there on your own you come up together.”
He wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing without that time with them, he says.
“They showed me how to do it. We figured it out together.”
They’re still mates, that comic rabble, though a lot of them are in the UK now.
Parker is willing to go where the work is but moving to London? Forget it.
“Not interested. No way. What the hell? I mean I think London is horrible. You spend half your day underground in a tube, you have the worst, longest winters of your life, you have two weeks of summer swimming in the heat … It feels like Stockholm syndrome. New Zealand is such an amazing country. I love its quirks. I love the scale of this city – Auckland feels large but also tiny. I’m so committed to living in New Zealand.”
Besides, it’s not just him anymore. There’s McCabe, who he married in 2022, and little Margo, who leaps up onto Parker’s lap on command.
She’s a darling thing. Not too keen on other dogs, mind. Also not all that keen being on a lead. Doesn’t love being left alone. Yes, an absolutely lovely addition, says Parker.
Margo aside, Parker’s life sounds like a giddy whirl of gigs and projects. He insists it’s a bit more mellow than a few years back when work overload induced a panic attack while he was in Sydney.
“I think because I spent the bulk of my 20s really focusing on me and my career – I’ve always been so ambitious – I reached a kind of burnout a few years ago. My workload was astronomical. You’re in a bind as a creative person when work is intense because you have to be grateful. It’s either feast or famine. I was so grateful for the work but it was the same year I was getting married, I was writing a TV show, a book, I had a whole lot of influencer contracts, I was touring a show, I was making a documentary series. I didn’t feel like I had time to breathe …
“If there was space on my calendar I could do it. I have always been that way and my new manager was like, space on the calendar is good. That space can nourish you as an artist, it can grow you as a performer. It can give you time to think, to rest. So this year I’m really focusing on not trying to fill every day. What brings me happiness is the way I have been able to nourish my life in those off times.”
So right now, this is the good life, he says. Harnessing those small things, like seeing the sun flood into their apartment in the wintertime, seeing friends moving into new eras of their lives.
“Micheal and I built a big cabinet for our deck – from scratch. That brought me happiness. It’s the simple pleasures.”
BOOK: Stop Being So Dramatic! Is touring nationwide with shows in Christchurch at James Hay Theatre tonight (June 28), Wellington’s Opera House on July 19 and Hamilton’s Heaphy Room, July 20, chrisparkercomedy.com/event