Schalk Bezuidenhout. The ballet, the blood and the belly laughs.
The lights go out. No fanfare. No spotlight. Just the unmistakable voice of Schalk Bezuidenhout ringing out from the darkness like some divine comedy prophet. Or a stoned cousin interrupting a power cut.
If you’re an audience member who thinks you’re funny, he warns, this is not the night for you. Challenge accepted. And quickly surrendered.
This was the final stop on Schalk’s international tour, and the South African comic was in no mood to coast to the finish line.
He lit up Auckland’s packed Bruce Mason Centre with an electric mix of stand-up, absurdist theatre, and low-key political roasting that had the packed house howling like it was their last night on Earth.
From the jump, Schalk slices into the absurdity of his global success with the kind of offhand charisma that makes you feel like you’re catching up with an old friend. If your friend happened to have a moustache and an encyclopaedic knowledge of South African.
I started touring in 2017. Back then, most of the world only knew two things about South Africa. Nelson Mandela and that guy who shot his girlfriend. I forget his name. Ouch. Welcome to Schalk’s world.
There’s political edge without self-importance.
Jabs at Elon Musk come fast and merciless. A South African in the White House makes me feel weird. His eyes are too close together. It’s the kind of throwaway line you’ll be chuckling about while brushing your teeth tomorrow morning.
But it’s when Schalk riffs on South Africa’s medical system that the night truly ignites.
We have the best doctors in the world, he beams. Why? Because you can learn a lifetime’s experience in one month in South Africa. In Norway, they get one stabbing every ten years. In SA? Ten a night, baby! A doctor can be stitching a stab wound while being stabbed by the same patient.
The audience wheezes. One woman near the front lets out a full-body snort. Nobody judges her.
Mid-show, Schalk pulls a young audience member onto stage for a volunteer moment that turns into pure improv magic.
The man delivers a clumsy dad joke, which Schalk weaponises into a running gag, before transforming the same volunteer into a human coat rack in the show’s anarchic final act. And that’s not even the punchline.
As Schalk sheds his outerwear—layer by layer—onto this unsuspecting Kiwi Adonis, the crowd can barely breathe.
Underneath it all? A black leotard that signals the start of the wildest curtain call in recent memory. Just when you think the show’s over, Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone blasts through the speakers. And Schalk re-emerges, leaping like a caffeinated gazelle in a full-body ballet routine that would leave the Royal New Zealand Ballet in tears of confusion.
Then it happens. The fall. Like a stadium rocker, Schalk throws himself backwards into the crowd, and they catch him. They don’t just catch him—they lift him, surf him, pass him like a communion offering all the way to the back of the Bruce Mason Centre.
It’s comic theatre. It’s performance art. It’s bloody genius.
No other comedian ends a tour like this.
Schalk didn’t just bring the house down. He danced it down, crowd-surfed across its ruins, and left us wondering what the hell just happened.
Verdict: ★★★★★ (5 stars)
Schalk Bezuidenhout is a rare comedy alchemist—fusing satire, silliness, and full-blown spectacle into a live show that’ll live rent-free in your memory forever.
Paul Marshall
