JUST JOSHING

Josh Thomson’s mix of talent, eccentricity and vulnerability have put ‘‘Timaru’s fourth Tongan’’ in high demand. Grant Smithies reports.

IT’S still out there somewhere, he reckons, on the family farm near Timaru: Josh Thomson’s first movie. He made it when he was just 13, ‘‘Timaru’s fourth Tongan’’, wandering around rural Canterbury with a video camera, wearing snug black clothes and the kind of stretchy knitted mask generally seen on Police 10-7.

Decades before starring as Pigsy in Netflix’s The New Legends of Monkey, Thomson was making his first kung fu flick in the back-blocks of his hometown.

‘‘I did this scene where I swam across a river,’’ he tells me from his home in West Auckland’s Ranui. Daughter Soana, 4, and son George, 2, can be heard hooning about nearby.

‘‘I had a balaclava on, to look all ninjay, and it was a really gross polluted river, with a lot of farm effluent in it. I remember coming out the other side and vomiting, but I vomited into the balaclava, then inhaled it back in. So there’s about a minute of footage of this big Polynesian ninja chundering and choking and trying to breathe in a wet balaclava.’’

I would pay good money to see that scene.

Surely it deserves a place on Thomson’s show-reel, alongside the early Fresh Up and Cash Converters ads, the winningly weird rambles from The Project and 7 Days, the bit where he sprouts alarming horns and claws as a shopping mall ‘‘Christmas Satan’’ in Wellington Paranormal?

It should be right up there with key clips from all his early TV series – Hounds, Short Poppies, Step Dave, Terry Teo, Coverband – and standout segments from Gary of The Pacific, Monkey and all the rest.

‘‘Mate, I would love to find that old tape. It will still be at the farm somewhere, but there’s, like, 300 VHS tapes out there. My mum used to tape endless cooking shows like Yan Can

Cook and The Galloping Gourmet, so it will be on the end of one of those.’’

His mum Soana passed away many years ago. Josh and his partner, actor Elizabeth McGlinn, named their first child after her.

But his dad David still lives out on the family farm where Thomson grew up alongside two older brothers.

‘‘Mum was Tongan, and dad’s people were originally Scottish. He’s an exengineer, so he spends his days making unintentionally dangerous devices. He made this air cannon that shoots out frozen squid bait on hooks into the ocean. He did a lot of testing in the paddocks around the farm and came close to hitting the neighbour’s horses. I sent emails saying he should take it easy. He’s 72. No, no. He’s 82, I think. Anyway, he’s an incredible man.’’

Like father, like son. Josh Thomson is a marvel, too. He has carved out a niche as Aotearoa’s reigning comedy surrealist. You saw glimpses of it sometimes on The Project when he went off-script, lurching into eccentric improvisations on live TV.

But it was 7 Days where Thomson got to really spin his wheels. It became clear that he was stranger and more exploratory than many of his contemporaries.

Thomson would often just start into something obliquely related to the topic at hand with no idea how it might end, piecing together a freshly-minted funny monologue in front of your eyes, the riffs loose as a goose. It seemed brave: here was a man who trusted in his abilities – happy on the high wire, with no net.

‘‘Partly, that’s because I also work editing behind the scenes, and we edit out the bits that fail. My safety net is that people never see the s... ones I do that fall apart. But you’re right. I’ve never been very good at straight punch-line stuff. The other comedians on 7 Days are a lot faster getting to a perfect pay-off line whereas I’ll just have an idea I think might be funny and no ending for it. So, I just … start.’’

He imagines people are often confused and amused at the same time.

‘‘But it fits with the sorts of things I personally find funny. I mean, I love jokes, but I also love awkward conversations where people get passionate about weird things to the extent that they get all vulnerable and real and you’re the witness.

‘‘I try and take that vibe onto 7 Days. I get unreasonably passionate about rubbish stuff, and it’s the contrast that’s funny, rather than the content or the end point. I’m hoping people will enjoy the journey, without there having to be any sort of destination.’’

It’s an approach that gets him noticed and gets him work. Thomson seems to be on a surging upward trajectory, his mix of talent, eccentricity and vulnerability in high demand both here and overseas.

We’ve hooked up today via a terrible distorted cellphone connection to talk about a new Australian movie called How To Please A Woman, in which Thomson plays a stripper/sex worker/ cleaner/furniture removals guy.

Written and directed by Rene´ e Webster, it’s very loosely based on the true story of a women-run Australian company set up to offer safe, respectful sexual services for other women.

In Webster’s fictional version, a failed removals company run by lonely silver fox Steve (Erik Thomson; 800 Words, Coming Home in The Dark) gets taken over by equally lonely liquidation agent Gina (Sally Phillips; Smack the Pony, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Veep, Miranda) and given a serious rebrand.

The concept? Take a team of well-built former house-movers and hire them out to provide companionship, playful nudity, physical pleasure and sparkling clean homes to the women of Western Australia.

Cheesy moments sit side by side with moving passages concerning lonely women stuck in loveless marriages and

thrusty young men who believe themselves to be crash-hot lovers due to a limited repertoire of skills they have learned from watching porn.

And in the middle of it all, there’s Josh Thomson, who gets the best line of the entire movie as everyone stands around the office, trying to come up with a respectable motto for the new business website. His suggestion: ‘‘Rock-solid bestever root you’ll get all year’’.

Thomson’s character doesn’t get booked for as many sexual encounters as the other guys, though. What’s up with that?

‘‘Well, you know. The people making the movie might have taken one look at me with my clothes off and gone, oh, OK, well, you can be the admin guy.’’

Thomson does strip in the movie, however, dropping his jeans and enthusiastically waggling his hips while Tom Jones sings Sex Bomb through a tiny boom-box.

‘‘I have to tell you that was a difficult scene. That was my very first day on set.

‘‘It was very awkward because Sally and Erik are acting royalty. You turn up on day one, say ‘Hi’ to everyone, and then they’re like, OK, stand on this spot and take your clothes off.’’

Under the movie’s YouTube trailer, I see some fan has written ‘‘Go, Josh! You’re a sex symbol now!’’

‘‘Well, I’ve been a sex symbol the whole time, of course. It turns out I have a following in Brazil, but it’s very niche and mainly among men. I did some other stuff with my shirt off, like in New Legends of Monkey I came out of the water topless behind the main guy at one point, which I’m sure was designed to make him look good by comparison.

‘‘There are blogs where people have collected those scenes and noted that I fall squarely into the ‘Bear’ category.’’

In gay culture, a bear is a larger, often hairier man who projects an image of

rugged masculinity.

‘‘Yes. And I appreciate the attention. I’ll take whatever praise I can get.’’

And then, suddenly, Thomson is assailed by a very different wild animal. ‘‘Daddy! Daddy! I’m a little baby mole!’’ says his wee daughter, who has just burst into the room.

‘‘Oops, looks like we’ve got a baby mole on the loose,’’ says Thomson, who then disappears for a while to help find her burrow.

When he gets back, I ask about future projects, but the line is so crap, I can barely hear what he says.

There’s an American movie coming out soon with Thomson in it, and something else involving esteemed Japanese anime writer Cain Kuga of Cowboy Bebop fame. Also, some sort of historical series where Thomson interviews kids about their favourite dead person.

He’s busy as hell, and rightly so. And between paid gigs, he still finds a lot of inspiration in everyday weirdness.

‘‘I was on a plane one time, and there was a farmer from Invercargill, heading up to Auckland. When the screens dropped down, he just started whacking the nearest screen.

‘‘The cabin crew asked him to stop, and he was, like… ‘This plane is falling apart! It’s your duty to tell us if the plane we’re travelling in is faulty!’ The guy just started screaming. Once he’d started, he didn’t seem to be able to just apologise and calm down, so he was going to make a big public stand.

‘‘This was the hill he was going to die on, and the social contract just fell apart for him.’’

It was strange, awkward, revealing of human frailty. There was no punchline.

‘‘The main thing was, the guy was committed. I love stuff like that.’’