Nick Offerman – All Rise

Nick Offerman, famed American actor, (Fargo, Parks And Recreation), comedian and writer, is once again touring Australia. His new show, All Rise, says Offerman is, “In the service of irreverence and non-conformity.” According to Offerman, the show is rife with “Deliberative talking,” which he says is like trying, “to deliver ideas at the same inexorable pace of a donkey pulling a cart laden with delicious produce.” Although a dig at mass consumerism amongst other ‘isms’ explored in this show, Offerman says All Rise aims to dwell on “The better side of humanity.”

Offerman is used to playing everyman types, full of faults and foibles to comic effect as demonstrated both in Parks And Recreation as the character of Ron Swanson who works within ‘The Pyramid Of Greatness’ and is an “authority on certain aspects of life, but is wildly, happily ignorant to many other aspects of modern culture,” and as the drunken lawyer, Karl Weathers, a literate intellectual with proverbial diarrhea, in Fargo, for which he was nominated for, The People’s Choice Award. Seriously though there is deep conviction behind Offerman’s rhetoric and, he describes himself as being, “always on the lookout for topics to unpack in the hope that we can all continue evolving to a place wherein we don’t feel the need to send our gay children to camps so that they might be fixed.”

His books too, with very long titles, the most recent being, THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD, (co-written with bride, Megan Mullally, ( Karen on Will And Grace), are full of humour derived from social observations of the world and people around him. “My many characters will undoubtedly be glimpsed through the lens of my own clumsy personality, I hope to, evoke laughter, indigestion, and inexplicable waves of heavy petting in the mezzanine.”

Above all Nick Offerman does libertarian well and all with a deadpan intensity that makes you take comedy seriously.

Jun 18. State Theatre, 47-51 Market St, Sydney. $81.32+b.f Tickets & Info: www.ticketmaster.com.au