the suggestion box (the attention seeker) review

11 Dec, 2025

my favorite comedian told me to kill myself. AND IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME!

the other day, i attended the attention seeker's the suggestion box comedy show at the covert theatre. the lineup was star-studded with new zealand's top comedians so i simply had to go.

but i forgot it was an attention seeker event and that meant there were gen Z employees standing around everywhere filming everyone. i had fallen back into their trap after the last time i attended their social events and found a video of myself running around ponsonby on reddit the next day.

the concept was that all the attendees—who were mostly marketers by account of this being hosted by the attention seeker—would write or draw a suggestion and place it in a box, which the seven comedians would rummage through to pick out and talk about at random. i briefly heard that the attention seeker had hosted the event to draw traction among comedians who often rely on organic social media content to grow their following, but i'm not sure how sharp my ears were.

my thoughts on each act in order:

• itay dom (MC): probably my second favorite act. his dry humor was consistently funny and cool, and i liked the running gag with the audience member donal which the other comedians carried on—a fun part of the show in general! the tinder anecdote cracked me up bad.
• nick rado: best act, no lulls. he was one of the only comedians that followed the format of the show very well, even when pulling out some incredibly tough prompts. like how do you as a white guy manage to make "japanese accent" so funny and unproblematic? i couldn't stop laughing as he recounted his solo 'birthday' visit to the teppanyaki restaurant in wellington.
• courtney dawson: she made absolutely nothing out the prompts, but her act was still pretty funny by fumbling. i can relate! the smacking gag was pretty funny but sweet... sweet? can i say that? in retrospect when i found out that she typically performs in a comedy duo with her father.
• anthony crum: pretty strong! he did good with what he was given. the herbivore vs carnivore story was hilarious.
• guy williams: he's funny but he's guy williams so he's all over the place in improv. i do wish he'd stuck more with the prompts as he was basically hungover and complaining about politics as he had done in his comedy festival show if you mildly criticise me i'll say it's cancel culture and turn to the alt-right which i watched earlier this year. it was a great show that i loved but felt a bit out of place considering things i'll discuss later. however, he is the only comedian who i had had the pleasure watching before and it's wholly possible that all the other comedians also just referenced bits they performed for other shows.
• pax assadi: pax was funny in general but it's that kind of race-based humor that also feels extremely awkward to watch as one of the 10 POC in a room full of white people—that's the whole point of it, i guess.
• tony lyall: put him around the same as anthony crum. the cumsock gag! i feel bad for him that this was being filmed.
• hoani hotene: pretty good. i honestly don't remember much of his act but by god there are some scary things going down in lower hutt.

overall i enjoyed the format of the show a lot. there was heaps of audience interaction, from the suggestion box itself to comedians involving particular audience members to them continuing those in-jokes across acts. the intimate nature of the cover theatre helped to tie it all together. i was just thinking before about how much i love pro wrestling for its audience interactivity without direct involvement—its ability to connect closed-off people like me to community—and i now think stand-up comedy can be much the same.

so i'd love to watch another show like this with adjustments to get the audience and the comedians on the same page.

it felt like half of the audience were expecting improv acting and when comedians got those prompts they were very clearly confused on what to do with them because these guys are comedians not actors. i would be more clear on that point first thing.

second thing, i would vet the suggestions for anything racist/ableist/etcist. seriously, what did you people expect these comedians to do with the prompt "down syndrome"?

i think it's possible to make funny jokes around the meta of these prompts (which the comedians managed well) but there's only so much you can do with that before you're just throwing away offensive suggestions as soon as you see them. it feels more like the prompt writer was expecting one of the comedians to impersonate someone with down syndrome which is much more disheartening. the same goes for "japanese accent", which, while you could have written just to see how a comedian would react, is pretty fucking hard to believe when i watched a white audience member yell out "do a japanese accent!" so excitedly.

hey, you know this is the attention seeker, right? their whole thing is that they film everything and put it all on social media. the show was funny in context but when this goes up on youtube—and you know they want to take advantage of the guy williams and hoani hotene name—your voice will be immortalized egging on a racist caricature.

and i guess that's why guy williams' segment felt so out of place. i love transgender people and i am happy he loves transgender people enough to shout them out too. but it does feel awkward knowing this is the same audience who thought it funny to suggest ableist and racist prompts, because for all we know the comedians might have just missed picking up a slip of paper suggesting a man in a dress.

these days my social interaction mainly comes in the form of attending weekly HIV foundation volunteering sessions and while i'd love to match with some women on tinder the only people interested in me are older gay men.¹ it's easy to forget that most people around are straight, cis, neurotypical, and white. i appreciate pax assadi's segment much more in retrospect!

i actually don't think this would matter if it was any old comedy show—like i said the offensive prompts did lead to a lot of funny comedy—but this was essentially a christmas event for a private marketing company so from a purely marketing perspective it's not what i'd want my business to be associated with.

speaking of marketing, did no one tell the comedians what this show was for? guy williams made some joke about how "we're in ponsonby, half of you guys are probably marketers. go quit your job or kill yourself." like yeah man literally half of the people in the audience are direct employees of an organic marketing company and nearly everyone else works in marketing as well because this is a social event for marketers.

anyhow i'm pretty fascinated by these attention seeker guys. what an interesting company that they can get their employees to do a 7 km run at 6 pm on a friday every week and then host what is essentially an end of year event with multiple of new zealand's biggest comedians. the CEO stan feels like a total character. i guess if i am to work in marketing long-term i'll have to become familiar with the big guns.²

#2025 #marketing #new zealand #review