AV-A-LAUGH-TA: Alan Committie's 28th Solo Show and He's Still Swinging
Photo: Claude Bernado
Twenty-eight solo shows. Think about that for a moment. While the rest of us have been getting on with our lives, changing jobs, moving houses, losing track of where the years went, Alan Committie has been quietly, consistently, prolifically producing original comedy. One show a year, more or less, for the better part of three decades. It is the kind of creative stamina that deserves acknowledgement before anything else, and it sets the tone for an evening that feels less like a performance and more like a visit from an old friend who always arrives with new stories.
AV-A-LAUGH-TA, his latest offering at Pieter Toerien's Montecasino Theatre, is very much the work of a man who has found his groove and is thoroughly at home in it. You know, roughly, what you are in for: rapid-fire wordplay, tangential digressions that loop back with impeccable comic timing, a flipchart that will be produced at some point to great effect, a healthy dose of audience interaction, and a performer whose physical energy seems entirely indifferent to the laws of ageing. What changes from show to show is the material, and this time, it is a wide-ranging, cheerfully eclectic tour through the particular absurdities of life in 2025.
Relatable Madness
The show's central premise: that the world has gone completely, extraterrestrially strange, is fertile ground for a comedian with Committie's observational instincts. He riffs on the indignities of passport photos, the economics of audiobooks, and what happens when a Temu version fails to deliver on its promise, and the peculiarities of Italian bus travel. He also takes a playful swipe at the world of musical theatre, finding gentle comedy in the well-worn tropes of Joseph and Cats (two recent Johannesburg revivals) and in the curious cultural compulsion to keep bringing them back, again and again, as if we might finally get a different ending.
These are not topics that belong to any single political moment; they are the textures of recognisably modern life, and Committie mines them with the easy confidence of someone who has spent decades noticing things that other people overlook. What is particularly pleasing is how rooted the show feels in the South African experience. For all its references to universal frustrations, AV-A-LAUGH-TA speaks directly to a local audience in a way that feels deliberate and warm. The laughs were plentiful on the Sunday afternoon I attended, and the room had the atmosphere of a gathering of people who were, to borrow Committie's own framing, badly in need of an hour and a half of relief from the weight of the world outside.
Part of the particular joy of a Committie show is the game his wordplay sets up for the audience. He telegraphs just enough of a setup that you find yourself leaning forward, trying to anticipate the punchline. If you get there first, there is a small, private thrill in the speed of your own mind. If he catches you off guard (and he often does) the laughter that follows is the genuine, involuntary kind. It is a generous comic contract, one that rewards both the sharp and the surprised.
Photo: Claude Bernardo
The Iceberg Has Entered the Chat
The show's centrepiece is an extended recreation of the twelve best minutes of Titanic, the 1997 James Cameron film, in its full, catastrophic, Oscar-laden glory, performed solo, in real time, with nothing but Committie's body, voice, and considerable theatrical instinct. It is genuinely, gloriously bizarre: the kind of set piece that raises more questions than it answers and is all the better for it. The highlight is the recruitment of an unsuspecting audience member from the front row to play the iceberg. At the performance I attended it was a gentleman named George who had absolutely no idea what was happening. That bewilderment became the funniest thing in the room, and it is the sort of unrepeatable, unscripted moment that reminds you why live comedy is alive and well.
There is a generosity of spirit throughout the evening that is, in itself, part of the appeal. When a joke does not quite land, Committie catches it, holds it up to the light, and turns the moment into the next laugh. His self-deprecation is not a defence mechanism so much as an extension of the performance, a reminder that the laughter is always the point, and that the point is never in danger. The show may be looser in construction than some of his previous work, but that looseness has a warmth to it; it feels less like a polished product and more like an evening spent in good company.
We are living through a moment when the argument for gathering in a room and laughing together has rarely felt more urgent. Committie said it himself from the stage: right now, we need to be gathering in groups of giggles, guffaws, and belly laughs. It is hard to disagree. AV-A-LAUGH-TA is the show you need on a Sunday afternoon in March, and that is not a small thing.
Twenty-eight shows in, Alan Committie remains one of the genuine stalwarts of South African comedy, a performer who has earned the right to his own idiom, and who delivers it with the ease of someone who has never once considered doing anything else.
AV-A-LAUGH-TA runs at Pieter Toerien's Montecasino Theatre until 12 April 2026.