“My life is a joke” – David Correos
From Burger King ads to Celebrity Treasure Island, Christchurch boy David Correos talks to Metropol deputy editor Tamara Pitelen about building a career in jokes.
David Correos, by his own admission, is not everyone’s cup of tea. Probably most well-known from being on TVNZ’s Taskmaster New Zealand and the Burger King ads, his style of comedy ranges from hilarious to chaotic, experimental and bizarre. He has had people walk out on his show, shouting as they go that he’s the worst stand-up they’ve ever seen. While most people would be destroyed by that kind of ‘feedback’. Not our David (yes, he’s a Christchurch boy), for him it’s all just fuel for the fire. “When something doesn’t land, that’s the thing that makes me want to go again,” he says. “I need to figure out why.”
He enjoys creating tension and making his audience feel a little uneasy, uncertain about what he might do next. “I love when it feels electric,” he says. “When people are like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work.’”
If you’re reading this and thinking, ‘he’s probably not for me…’ don’t get me wrong, there is something about him. I binge-watched David’s season of Taskmaster New Zealand because of him. I could not get enough of the man, and I’m not alone. In 2024, he opened for Australian comedy group Aunty Donna on a UK tour, performing in major venues, including to thousands of people at London’s comedy mecca, the Hammersmith Apollo. He’s also a regular at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
In May, he’ll be performing in the 2026 NZ International Comedy Festival and he’s also on your television screen right now in the new season of Celebrity Treasure Island on TVNZ, alongside fellow Cantabrian Simon Barnett.
Lyttelton roots
Where did it all begin? Long before the Hammersmith Apollo, David was a kid running wild through the streets of Lyttelton.
“I grew up on the east side,” he says. “My parents owned a restaurant in Lyttelton… so I was just running amok around there, causing trouble.” The restaurant, Lyttelton Carinderia, specialised in Filipino food, serving a steady stream of Filipino seafarers passing through the port. A carinderia, he explains, is a cafeteria-style eatery in the Philippines.
David’s parents both arrived in New Zealand in the 1980s, part of a much smaller Filipino community than exists today. Their story is as improbable as it is romantic: his father, working at sea, was invited to a party that turned out to be the funeral of David’s mother’s late husband. “He was like, ‘Well, she’s single,” he says, laughing. “So they met at mum’s first husband’s funeral. They’ve been happily married for 37 years now.”
Back then, the Filipino population in Christchurch was tight-knit to the point of being trackable. David recalls family members keeping handwritten directories of every Filipino family in the city – notes on who had arrived, how many children they had, where they lived, and so on. “It’s impossible to do that now,” he says. “There are just so many Filipinos, which is great, although there’s a nostalgia for the ’90s and early 2000s, when it felt like a really strong, close community.”
The same could be said of Lyttelton. Once a slightly rough-around-the-edges port town where a young David could roam freely, it’s now “so hip and trendy,” he says. He still visits when he comes home, once or twice a year, but his family has since moved out to Woolston. “Some parts are desirable… and then there’s Ferry Road, which is just dangerous.”
To make his point, he tells me about the time he went for a job at a local 24/7 convenience store on Ferry Road. After being shown the freezer where staff could lock themselves in during a robbery, he decided retail wasn’t his calling.
It would have to be comedy, then, but the path wasn’t clear.
He dabbled in other art forms initially. “Stand-up, once I found it, clicked. And I wouldn’t feel so let down if I missed the mark, or if I failed. It just made me go ‘I want to keep going, harder’.
It just felt right. It was the first time I felt freedom when it came to performing,” he says. “I could decide what I wanted to do – and I just wanted to keep doing that. Yeah, getting the laughs is sick, but the really good feeling was, when you bomb and you kind of suck, you get this weird drive to want to go again.”
The lure of magic
Christchurch played a crucial role in that discovery. In the early 2010s, the city’s comedy scene was in a kind of rebuilding phase, with venues like The Darkroom hosting emerging acts and experimental shows. David found his footing there, alongside other local performers he still admires.
“Guys like Shay Horay and Derek Flores, also known as El Jaguar. That was the first time I met those guys, the ones I really look up to in stand-up. Also, The Boy With Tape On His Face, Sam Wills.”
He also found support in unlikely places, including a magic shop in the CBD. “I had a lot of mentors in Christchurch, I used to hang out at The Castle of Magic on Colombo Street. I met a lot of magicians, who have a crossover with stand-up comedy. And I met Reg Blackwood, who was one of my first mentors, he’s a hypnotist stand-up. So I never had formal training, but I had people who supported me and told me to go for it.”
That encouragement paid off. In 2014, after just over a year of performing, he pushed to enter a national comedy competition that, at the time, didn’t even include a South Island heat. After impressing organisers at Auckland’s The Classic Comedy Club, a Christchurch round was added, which was a small but significant moment for the local scene. David placed second in the national competition. “It was pretty iconic,” he says. The night also featured a teenage newcomer, Jack Ansett, at his very first gig. Both would go on to become fixtures in New Zealand comedy.
For David, though, the next step was clear: leave. “You can’t really make a career of stand-up in Christchurch,” he says. “There’s just not much happening.” By the end of 2014, he had moved to Auckland to pursue comedy full-time.
From there, things built slowly. He performed, travelled, and eventually took his work overseas, including a challenging run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “It wasn’t going well,” he admits. “I didn’t really have a clear path.”
Godsend
The turning point came with Taskmaster New Zealand. The show’s format – part chaos, part ingenuity – proved a perfect fit for his unpredictable, highly physical style. More importantly, it gave audiences a clearer sense of who he was.
“It was a real godsend. It flipped my career upside down. It helped me understand why people find me funny,” he says. “Before that, it was a lot of testing.”
Since then, his career has accelerated. He’s built a dedicated following, refined his voice, and, crucially, made big changes offstage too – including giving up alcohol for more than seven years. “I don’t drink anymore,” he says. “It just made everything clearer.”
These days, David describes himself as “nomadic” – travelling between countries, following tours, and living without a fixed base alongside his partner, who works behind the scenes in film and television. It’s a lifestyle that suits his restless creative energy, even if he jokes that it’s just “a nicer way to say homeless.”
Still, Christchurch remains a constant. His family is spread across the city – Woolston, Halswell, Rolleston – and he returns regularly, reconnecting not just with them, but with the place that shaped him.
Because for all the international gigs and television appearances, the core of David Correos’ comedy – its unpredictability, its energy, its sense that anything might happen – can still be traced back to a kid in Lyttelton, running loose between tables in a Filipino restaurant, absorbing stories and a whole lot of chaos. Turning it all into something electric.
David is now starring in Celebrity Treasure Island on TVNZ and will be performing his show Touching My Active Mind at the New Zealand International Comedy Festival.
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QUICKFIRE WITH DAVID
What are you reading and listening to? Right now, I’m reading The Serious Guide to Joke Writing by Sally Holloway, and lately, I’ve been listening to bossa nova covers. Beautiful Chaos by Katseye, I love that album. I’m also listening to a stand-up comedy album called Hannibal Buress: Live in Chicago.
First album you ever bought? Neil Diamond’s Greatest Hits.
Ever broken a bone? Yes, I broke my arm on the very last day of primary school, and so we were all getting a really fun day, and then I ended it by breaking my arm just before the holidays.
Last TV series binge? Let me think, I barely watch any TV. Oh, this was ages ago, but I watched the second season of The Rehearsal.
Your comfort food of choice? Canned corn beef with onions, and then a steamed hot bowl of white rice, and then some vinegar and fish sauce mixed up on it.
Your best one-liner? Everyone in New Zealand says they love recycling until you serve them a glass of water from the dehumidifier.
