The world is on fire. Chris Parker has thoughts
Sunday, 21 June 2026
The world feels increasingly absurd, audiences are shrinking, and half of New Zealand seems to have moved overseas. Chris Parker talks about comedy, catastrophe, and why he's still committed to making people scream with laughter. By André Chumko.
The day Chris Parker has chosen to build an entire comedy show around is February 10, 2026 - a Tuesday, the 41st day of the year, and a day that, for all intents and purposes, is intentionally unremarkable in almost every way.
In a time when the news often seems unbelievable, the entertainer has attempted to reflect and capture the essence of what it feels like to be alive today: exhausted, untethered, bored - but also navigating a never-ending legion of existential threats.
“The world feels really scary and big, and it’s hard to grasp what’s happening. You have to read the headlines twice to be like, is this actually going on? … It’s having to smile through it and act like everything’s really normal, and we cannot wait to try the viral dot cake, but at the same time you’re reading about World War III,” Parker tells the Sunday Star-Times.
Speaking via video link, the 35-year-old actor, comedian, podcaster, writer and television personality says he’s already had feedback on his new live show from Melbourne audiences that “it’s amazing how you can make comedy out of nothing”.
Others found the material a validation of the mix of complex feelings swirling around that are all-consuming but equally hard to articulate with specificity.
Don’t expect a lecture or a preachy show, or to be given any useful advice on how to deal with the dread or the helplessness.
“I’m just trying to say I feel it as well,” Parker says.
“I do think potentially [examining] how we’re reading the news would help soften the way we feel about it, maybe. I feel like our parents’ generation is like, ‘Oh, news has always been a bit bad’ - but they were reading it on a newspaper, and the act of holding this giant newspaper made it digestible.”
That, and they could literally throw it into a fireplace at the end of the night.
“I would love to throw my phone into the fire,” Parker says.
Finding the funny
Growing up in Christchurch as one of four siblings, Parker - steadfast in his commitment to ending up on the stage in any capacity, and considering himself a born entertainer - in fact first wanted to be a dancer; so much so that if he didn’t get into Toi Whakaari he would’ve gone to the NZ School of Dance instead.
The hypothetical never happened. Parker got into Toi in Wellington and studied there for three years - the only thing he’s ever truly, desperately wanted in his life.
“I was surrounded by creative people. It was this personal renaissance of hanging out with gay people, going to theatre and shows, and making my own shows. That’s when I started devising theatre that was sitting in between comedy and theatre - Hayley Sproull and I were making sketch comedy,” Parker stops.
“Oh my God. Sorry. I can see the Sky Tower from my apartment and there’s always people bungy jumping, and there was just this body falling from the sky.”
Back to the matter at hand.
“Hayley and I were making sketches - that was feeling really good. The access comedy gives you to the stage is so immediate. There’s no casting directors, no scripts, no rehearsal. You can just get out there and start and get into it. I’m all about that - like, I just want to be on stage. I hate the admin around it all.”
From there Parker fell into the improv group Snort, and was making standup and hanging out with the likes of Rose Matafeo, Guy Montgomery and Eli Matthewson.
Fast-forward to today and Parker’s credits are too long to mention: in 2018 he won the prestigious Fred Award for his comedy show Camp Binch; he’s written a novel, Here for a Good Time: Organised Thoughts From a Disorganised Mind; in 2021 he won reality TV show Celebrity Treasure Island.
Many will have encountered Parker’s viral Instagram videos during the pandemic years, in which he began needle-felting to cope with the lockdown - a hat that Parker created in 2020 was added to the Auckland Museum collection, and a photo of him wearing it was purchased by Te Papa.
In between touring and writing for television and stand-up, these days Parker - who’s married to designer Micheal McCabe - is trying to resist the obvious pull to Australia as New Zealand’s economic woes continue to bite audience sizes.
“No-one has any money. So I do think you have more capital and people in other cities than you do in New Zealand, and that’s tempting to want to move over there. But I’m just really committed to this country. I love this country. I love New Zealand audiences, and I don’t want to,” he says.
Parker sold out shows in London last year and observed the crowd was full of expat Kiwis. “I’m like, OK guys, we could have done this in Wellington. … That younger audience have moved overseas, and rightly so. Why wouldn’t you?”
The international exodus has given Parker’s hometown shows an added resonance.
“I’ve been loving doing material in Auckland. It feels so weirdly radical to admit that the city is struggling and everyone’s gone. It feels cathartic to address it in a room with the people who have decided to stay. … [The new show] sounds really doom and gloom, but I promise it’s righteous, it’s really fun, it’s really cathartic - but it does talk about the dark stuff that we all feel and have observed,” he says.
“This is me getting a bit competitive, but you’ll never see a comedian work harder to make you laugh. I say to myself before I go on stage, do not give up on them. So my threshold of where I want my audience to be is screaming with laughter. I’m relentless in that pursuit, so it’s guaranteed, in my opinion.”
Reading the room
Amid everything else Parker continues to co-host his long-time podcast The Male Gayz with fellow comic Matthewson - a project that’s now a decade in and has seen the pair navigate their lives through their 20s and 30s.
As gay men releasing episodes into a now-oversaturated podcast market, Parker feels a certain degree more power now today as a queer artist - even though he says not a lot of gay men come to see him live. (His demographic, according to Instagram, is women aged between 35 and 45.)
Parker says he is as honest as he can be with his new material - he tries not to fall on lazy gay tropes, and notes that most stereotypes do not even apply to him: “I’m married and have been in the same monogamous relationship for 11 years. I haven’t downloaded Grindr since Jacinda [Ardern] was an MP.
“… I just love a new idea, I love a new angle, I don’t like crowd work, I don’t like jokes about people’s ethnicities or sexuality really. I want to hear about what we’re going through now. I just always prefer - I know it’s a hack to say cutting-edge material - but stuff that feels dangerous and right on the edge.”
With the microphone also comes the power of feeling the needle being pushed in real time - and sometimes scary parallels between spectator appetite and global politics.
Parker paints a picture of the comedian constantly reading the audience tide: what are people sensitive to or comfortable with, where are the boundaries of what’s acceptable and what’s not?
He wonders whether a focus on anti-intellectualist brainrot-type humour that followed the #MeToo woke revolution of 2018, gave space for those who felt like they no longer had a voice in comedy to improve their material.
“Suddenly the jokes got worse, and then these guys got funny. And then before you knew it Matt Rife was the biggest comic,” Parker says.
“It could be an age thing, but I am a bit existential about the state of entertainment at the moment. It just feels a bit crazy with how much slop there is around, and how much people are willing to accept slop.”
In protest, he is learning to knit.
“When everything is so immediate and fast, results-driven, and AI-generated, to just go in the opposite direction and spend four weeks knitting a beanie you’re never going to wear feels truly kind of punk.”
Chris Parker’s Take A Good Hard Look At Me, Sept 4 in Wellington, Sept 5 in Christchurch and Sept 11-12 in Auckland. Ticketing info: chrisparkercomedy.com