Gig Review: Jon Ronson’s Psychopath Night Live
A review of Jon Ronson’s “Psychopath Night” tour as he touches down for one New Zealand show on his first ever visit here
Jon Ronson: Jon Ronson’s Psychopath Night — Live
Opera House, Wellington
Tuesday, November 26
Author, podcaster, documentarian, journalist — “humanist” — Jon Ronson has spent a lot of time writing humorous articles and making quirky films that also probe deep into the fascinating aspects of humanity, why good people do bad things, why bad people do good things, the rules of cancel culture, and how as institutions around us crumble, narcissism is the victor. In 2011 he penned The Psychopath Test, which looked at various stories around psychopathy, including the checklist for whether you, or someone you know resembles this most terrifying and troubling of brain anomalies. The book drew links to psychopathy and the boardroom, to the CEOs and politicians of the world that were expert liars, felt little guilt or remorse, and were capable of superficial charm, just for starters.
Over a decade later, Ronson is still sporadically taking this book to the stage for an author talk with a twist.
Jon Ronson’s Psychopath Night was his first time in New Zealand — one show only — and the final date of a 30-gig tour.
He started by reading a hilarious column from some 15-20 years ago when he was a Guardian regular, and then moved into the evening’s topic, describing how he found his material and flow for The Psychopath Test. Ronson is a charming introvert, he works hard to tell his stories with ease from the stage. It’s very duck in the water, look closely you’ll see the legs scurrying. He introduced two special guests via Skype (such flawless technology that it was only when Ronson spoke over one of his guests that I think many in the audience could relax into the fact that this was not a pre-recorded ‘bit’!)
First we heard from Mary, who had been in a relationship with a man that was a confirmed psychopath. That diagnosis enabled her to move on and to help her kids understand the situation (two of her three children were to this man). She explained that it’s a very cat and mouse situation. As the mouse, it doesn’t matter what you look like or how you act, the cat (the psychopath in her analogy) is just lured in by the sport and game of it all. It’s not personal. It’s just the challenge. You become the mark. Mary detailed how the man she thought was a CIA agent — and infertile — had not only given her children, but had kids to several different women, including four to four different women within one calendar year. His long-game was to impregnate women and then take them for money. Even his parents were in on it.
Ronson has such a rapport with his “mystery guests” for the tour, because he’s worked with them on telling their stories not only across the several versions of his stage-show but in the writing of feature articles and his books. He even managed to find humour in the dark spots, pointing out that you could never accuse a psychopath of being lazy when Mary dropped the news of the maternity-ward rush.
Ronson also linked the psychopathy of the boardroom and political arena to the rise of Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the culture, and to bizarre cult-type predatorily-motivated celebrity-fringe dwellers, like Russell Brand.
What makes this less of a complete horror show and more of a friendly, forensic fossick, is the charm and empathy of Ronson, ever the hopeful humanist, his self-interest in these stories is exactly that: The crafting of the story. But his way with a word never takes the stage over a duty of care to his subjects.
In the second half we heard from Colin, jailed for 13 months because he looked very much like the police sketch compiled to catch a horrific murderer. Colin explained that he offered his DNA five times to police, uninterested, because a famous profiler had convinced them this was obviously the man — also an elaborate sting operation that was hilarious in Ronson’s retelling, and Colin’s unabashed willingness for this to all air, had a police officer posing as a letter-writer wanting to share lurid and explicit sexual fantasies with Colin, all in the hope he’d confess to a murder he did not commit. Only Jon Ronson could make bungled entrapment via awkward pornographic letters so laugh-out-loud funny, and strangely poignant and powerful all at once.
A Q&A session to finish had Mary and Colin on the big screens for audience questions, as well as Ronson answering the majority of them. This was the part I was most nervous about — Kiwi audiences either sit on their hands or rabbit, burrowing down into paragraphs when a sentence would do. Surprisingly, most of the questions were sensible, sensitive and short/ish.
What I loved most about this evening — and it was never overtly pointed out but it felt like a strong theme — was the way Ronson created the antidote for the lazy fix so many of us enjoy as a guilty pleasure. The true crime docos and podcasts that string us along and have us believing we’re close to Citizen Pathology and Criminology, are actually the new low in mass entertainment. Psychopath Night showed how the same dopamine drops and amygdala spikes could be achieved when a master storyteller combines his journalistic skills with his genuine (gentle) human empathy; a writer and storyteller and filmmaker and podcaster, not just the shorthanded “content creator”. We can’t be content with creating clickbait headlines and parading around the simplicity of a person being cancelled, so therefore bad, or achieving fame, so therefore good. What Ronson created for the stage was entertainment, absolutely, but it also felt cathartic, as well as compelling. This is what’s missing from so much in mainstream entertainment, in art, in so many aspects of the world: Catharsis. We seek it — always, and yet we hurtle towards greater frustrations and uncertainties and seek distraction for the little dribbles of dopamine. But something so cup-filling as catharsis takes things to whole new levels, indeed creates whole new levels. And that was the case (or cases) tonight.
