Credit: Andi Crown
You might recognise Guy Montgomery from his regular appearances on the likes of Thank God You’re Here and Have You Been Paying Attention? You could know the NZ comic from his own ABC panel show, Guy Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee. You might even be one of the many fans who’ve snapped up tickets to his upcoming Melbourne International Comedy Festival show, I’ve Noticed So Many Things, It’d Be Unfair To Keep Them To Myself.
For a real deep cut, though, a rare groove that offers a key to the hard-to-nail Montgomery aesthetic, you’ll want to travel back to 2014, the year he released a podcast named The Worst Idea of All Time. It’s a bombastic title. It might just be accurate.
Montgomery’s Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, which started with Zoom calls during COVID lockdowns.Credit: James Gourley/Publishd
The show’s first season saw Montgomery and co-host Tim Batt sitting down to watch and review the Adam Sandler comedy Grown Ups 2 every week for a year. It’s a film with a miserable 8 per cent rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. Metacritic, another site rounding up critical responses, states that the average reviewer’s sentiment towards the film is “overwhelming dislike”.
Grown Ups 2 is nowhere near a so-bad-it’s-good cult favourite. It’s a vapid and soulless affair, an unfunny ordeal that scored nine nominations at the 2014 Razzie Awards for worst films, including worst screenplay, worst actor and actress, worst director and worst screen combo (for the entire cast).
And yet: like many who gave The Worst Idea of All Time a quick listen, I ended up bingeing that entire season. That means I’ve listened to close to 50 hours of content about a film I have never seen – and hopefully never will.
In putting themselves through this thankless and punishing feat of mental and emotional endurance, Montgomery and Batt created a kind of comedy performance art that saw them battling illnesses, break-ups, living on different continents and other challenging life events while still managing to sit through and discuss the same 101 minutes of cinematic gruel week after week.
If it sounds like an unlikely recipe for success, it’s even more surprising to learn that the show is still going strong 11 years later. They’ve tinkered with the formula a little – after seasons reviewing films like Sex and the City 2 for 12 months, they now devote less time to each stinker and bring guests in to share the burden.
They’ve also launched spin-off series such as ’Til Death Do Us Blart, in which Montgomery, Batt and other comics stage an annual viewing of the notorious turkey, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, every US Thanksgiving holiday. They plan to keep up the annual tradition in perpetuity – hosts will be replaced by new comics when they die.
On paper, shows that focus on the same torturous topic episode after episode don’t sound like they’ll have mass appeal. Nor does a televised spelling bee, for that matter. You might even be forgiven for thinking that Montgomery has a perverse penchant for running in the opposite direction from success. He denies it with a laugh.
Guy Montgomery (left) and Tim Batt.
“I don’t have an inherent draw towards things I think will fail or necessarily be harder. I think part of the magic of both of those ideas was that they were not engineered to be successful ideas. Worst Idea of All Time we just thought was funny. We never thought this was the thing that was going to introduce us to a wider audience.”
But 18 million downloads have proven him wrong there, as have the many shows he’s already sold out at this year’s festival. A live version of Spelling Bee will be performed at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre, a venue with almost 3000 seats.
“The motive when we started doing (Worst Idea) wasn’t for it to be a popular podcast. It was to entertain ourselves and anyone who decided to come along for the ride. Spelling Bee, similarly, when it started I didn’t have the ambition for what it’s become. It started because I had nothing to do and thought I was good at spelling as a kid.”
But while Montgomery is a prolific presence across multiple mediums, it’s all in the service of stand-up. He’s written for others, appeared in films, done fundraisers, but he describes these ventures as “dream-adjacent”. However much he enjoys them, what he most hopes is that they’ll convince a few more punters to catch him live.
“When I found out how much I love doing stand-up, that became the north star. [I thought] I’ll keep doing stand-up and get good, hopefully build up an audience. That was always the driving force.”
Montgomery with his Guy Mont-Spelling Bee sidekick Aaron Chen.
From the early days – a little over a decade ago – Montgomery knew he could hold an audience’s attention. He lacked any particular craft or perspective, though, and so he took himself off to Canada to build up his live skills without embarrassing himself in front of his fellow New Zealanders.
“I did 10 open mics a week for a year,” Montgomery says. “With the volume of gigs I was doing there versus what was possible at home, I managed to accelerate through what would basically be three years of open mics in New Zealand.”
TAKE 7: THE ANSWERS ACCORDING TO GUY MONTGOMERY
- Worst habit? Picking up my phone 10 seconds after putting it down.
- Greatest fear? If you are talking about what keeps me up at night it’s a pretty common one, which is somebody discovering the poorly hidden body of my comedy rival in the Melbourne Botanic Gardens.
- The line that stayed with you? The Ratatouille ride at EuroDisney.
- Biggest regret? With hindsight, it would have to be bringing up the undiscovered body and location of my comedy rival in print media.
- Favourite book? I haven’t read it for a long time but Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley immediately springs to mind for really making my head spin,
- The artwork/song you wish was yours? Would be nice to be able to say I pitched in on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
- If you could time travel, where would you choose to go? About five minutes ago I sat down to fill out some questions for an interview in The Age. Seven questions in front of me and a blank slate with which to work. I would give anything for the opportunity to do these over.
A 2014 solo show scored him a Billy T Award, given to the most promising up-and-coming comic in New Zealand. He still felt intimidated by the prospect of crossing the Tasman, though. “Watching Australian comedians I felt like the laughs were bigger and the sets were punchier. Australia’s big to us.”
He first played the Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2015, in a split bill with Rose Matafeo, and when he returned for a solo show the following year he was nominated for a Best Newcomer award. The accolades he’s earned in the years since include a Best Male Comedian from the NZ Comedy Guild, a Best of the Fest at Sydney Comedy Festival and a Fred Award, New Zealand’s top comedy prize. He’s never let awards go to his ego. “The awards are so nice, holy moly, but no one outside of the immediate comedy community really knows or cares.”
It’s hard to pinpoint just what gives Montgomery’s stand-up shows their appeal. “I’m a pretty generic model of person,” he says. “I’m not presenting a wildly different perspective to anyone.”
It might just be that he’s so very affable. Where many comics seem to need validation, Montgomery looks more like he’s performing for his friends. He’s entertained by the fact that his recent TV successes mean a much more diverse crowd is buying tickets to his shows.
As his star has grown, however, he hasn’t needed to change his act. “The difference between a 100-seat room and an 800-seat room, there’s more people, but you’re doing the same thing,” he says. “You focus on the bits you can control, which is the jokes, the show, the delivery.”
Guy Montgomery: I’ve Noticed So Many Things, It’d Be Unfair To Keep Them To Myself, Athenaeum and Palais Theatres, until April 20. comedyfestival.com.au