Guy Montgomery Serves Up a Stealth Existential Anxiety Special

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From the first seconds of his new special, alternative New Zealand comedian Guy Montgomery addresses that you may not know anything about him. It’s the unsaid tension in any non-stadium audience—some people will be chuffed to bits they get to see their favorite niche comic, others will be praying this stranger won’t treat them to a painful hour. With his clipped, melodic accent, and elongated, deliberate delivery, Montgomery is a true gem, and his latest, aptly titled hour My Brain is Blowing Me Crazy pivots his singular voice to topics that can only be described as overwhelming.

It’s another key success for the Kiwi polymath; Montgomery has been working international stand-up and Fringe circuits for nearly 15 years. Together with Tim Batt, he created a new type of endurance comedy with the long-running podcast The Worst Idea of All Time, where he and Batt would watch Grown Ups 2 every week and review it for a full calendar year. They were depressed by Episode 3, they had introduced hard liquor by Episode 10. Soon came weekly watches of Sex and the City 2 and the seasonal McElroy brothers collab ‘Til Death Do Us Blart, with Montgomery graduating to a run on Taskmaster NZ Season 2, and his own panel show Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling-Bee. Montgomery’s booming popularity only reinforces his quasi-cult status—all his acclaimed projects only add to the bafflement he hasn’t broken through more.

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Maybe it’s his style that holds him back from mainstream attention—Montgomery talks like he is the smartest man in the world saying something relatively dumb, or the simplest man inadvertently stumbling onto an advanced plane of knowledge. It leaves an audience in a disarmed, bemused state as he builds a veering but tightly controlled momentum, interspersed with bursts of completely unearned aggression. He hyper-fixates on the most minute observations, verbosely plumbing them for laughs and unpacking normal, ingrained behavior for its unnoticed absurdities.

All of the above is readily available to see in My Brain, filmed last year in Brisbane, Australia. The special serves up the usual quality of Montgomery frivolity and amusingly outdated irks (doing Tutankhamun material in 2023 is especially choice) while also pivoting his comedic persona towards a subtly gargantuan angst. My Brain is Blowing Me Crazy feels like a stealth existential anxiety special, or at least, Montgomery’s attempt to fuel his mid-30s health, climate, and technological anxiety into a productive hope for the future, and his meaningful role within it.

Observations on talking to bores at parties and analyzing the social dynamics of gym bros soon mutates into an accusatory panic about ice, fish, and the advertisement industry, peppering in enough labored set-ups and anti-humor punchlines to convey how all of these serious topics are coalescing around him in a deeply distressing way.

It’s unclear how disturbed Guy Montgomery the person is by these issues, but Guy Montgomery’s on-stage persona (the one whose brain is being blown, crazy style) is experiencing a decent level of unease, and communicates this with a willful descent into manic frustration. You haven’t known true dopamine until you hear Guy Montgomery scream “idiot!”; no other comic has had the tenacity to call his audience “broke-arse cuckold communist scum” this year.

Montgomery leads the crowd with a tenor that suggests he’s on the verge of losing them, with an off-kilter confidence that asks us to take seriously his debunking of Clifford the Big Red Dog. He only occasionally falters with material of a narrow, tired scope (password software jokes in this day and age?) although it’s still elevated by his comedic style—it’s like his delivery is its own form of new material.

In the final act, Montgomery shifts up his special to talk about his new, blended family and it becomes apparent, in a shocking and moving reveal, the only person capable of rebutting his ultra-specific brand of rhetoric is an eight-year-old girl. This sincere insight leads to one of the most deranged riffs in Montgomery’s career, where he skewers the types of men still hung up on the Bechdel Test, painting a picture of someone using the media criticism to mask pure male delirium and mocking his poor sleepwear choices.

It’s not the first time Montgomery has mocked sexists who think they’re feminists, nor is it the first time he’s integrated genuine emotional insight into his alternative comedy—maybe because these topics are familiar to him does My Brain’s finale feel so earned. Montgomery’s new hour speaks with a voice of unstable stability, or stable instability—where he is constantly at odds with other people but also in deep harmony with a core few. Or in other words, it’s the type of special where he’s able to decry the ad industry and then drop the line, “I don’t give two shits, I just want to buy something.”

My Brain Is Blowing Me Crazy is currently streaming for free on YouTube.

Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.

Kiwi Comedian Guy Montgomery Serves Up a Stealth Existential Anxiety Special