Nick Offerman: Full Bush

11 February 2016 | 3:36 pm | Finn Kirkman

"A song about how he and his wife had a night of torrid sex with Jesus, or monologues about the joys of rocking a manly forest of pubic hair."

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It's reasonably hard to determine where Nick Offerman ends and Ron Swanson begins. There's so much of the affable actor in his hard-but-fair Parks and Recreation character that the two sometimes seem to blur — but when Offerman grabs his guitar or his hand-hewn mahogany ukulele on stage and begins belting out a song about how he and his wife had a night of torrid sex with Jesus, or monologues about the joys of rocking a manly forest of pubic hair, it's obvious where the simple, bacon-and-eggs-loving Swanson would have drawn the line.

Offerman is an amazingly charismatic performer and storyteller, and the show is laid-back and seemingly a bit off-the-cuff, with Offerman cracking himself up as much as the audience. His warm-up act, American accordion player Corn Mo, is another delightfully offbeat character and must have won a heap of fans with his leftfield songs and stories.

Mr Mo joins Offerman again at the end of the show, and the duo become a trio as comic actor John C Reilly bounds on stage resplendent in a ten-gallon hat — a friend of Offerman's, he's on the Gold Coast filming Kong: Skull Island and got the night off to join his mate onstage for a rendition of Irving Berlin's What'll I Do and a Tom Waits ditty. Reilly leaves the stage to Offerman for the final sign-off, and after ascertaining that 95% of the audience are Parks and Rec fans, closes the show with a rousing singalong to a very famous Bye-Bye indeed — the show's iconic musical send-off to Pawnee pony Li'l Sebastian.