Hoani Hotene (Ngāti Hauā) is a Billy T Award winning comedian with his show It’s Getting Hot-ene, So Tell Me All Your Jokes, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the Nelson Arts Festival in October. He talks with Michelle Duff about finding the funny in the difficult, being heckled by an elderly woman at a regional talent competition, and how food and whānau is his comfort zone.
In Conversation with
2nd October 2025
Hoani Hotene (Ngāti Hauā) is a Billy T Award winning comedian with his show It’s Getting Hot-ene, So Tell Me All Your Jokes, fresh from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to the Nelson Arts Festival in October. He talks with Michelle Duff about finding the funny in the difficult, being heckled by an elderly woman at a regional talent competition, and how food and whānau is his comfort zone.Michelle Duff: Some of your jokes are to do with translation, aren’t they? It seems like there’s humour in this space of being misunderstood.
Hoani Hotene: It’s almost like a rite of passage for a Māori comedian to do their own version of a Treaty of Waitangi joke. I have a tenancy agreement joke that I make about purposely mis-translating it. When I was starting, I had some jokes about identity, but not many, and most of it was silly stuff. And then I started talking about myself a bit more and then the whole country started to go backwards, it started to feel like there were issues that weren’t issues before. Like the Treaty Principles Bill, where you were like, ‘Man, I thought we were past this.’ So all of a sudden, everybody’s thinking about those things a lot more. The comedy is a response to that.