The news of Mike Loder’s sudden passing on 25 January 2022 swept through the New Zealand firearms and comedy communities like wildfire. All were shocked as he was only 50 and most were filled with dismay. Like him or not, Mike was a talented comedian and the strongest voice advocating for licenced owners and had been for almost 30 years. Mike was also a skilled artist with a charming wit, a frequently lewd sense of humour and an inquiring mind.

In his own words,

“I went to Remuera Primary, Remuera Intimidate (Where Ms. Carew once wrestled with her visiting sister in the class room and I had my first fantasy about a threesome) then Auckland Grammar School and Selwyn College.

I then worked in an office for a year or so, did digital imaging for a short time, worked in a gun shop for two years then found my passion – standup comedy. It was only near the end of my retail work that my boss discovered I had been writing “Call me for gay sex” on the back of the business cards he had been handing out.”

Comedy

Mike used to joke about being a stand-up comic, confined as he had been to a wheelchair for most of his adult life. Almost no topic was off-limits. His greatest complaint was the lack of wheelchair access to various clubs, with the Classic Comedy Club in Auckland the most frequent recipient of those. This post he made on social media was typical.

Mike was a prolific writer, producing material not just for his own shows but for others as well. He was also in demand for corporate events, for which he charged appropriately. As is common for such work however, such gigs were sporadic and uncertain. In answer to questions often posed by fans, he wrote the following for his website.

Do you write your own jokes?
“Yup. Nearly all contemporary stand-ups do. Nothing winds a comedian up like plagiarism. This makes it nearly impossible for talented new acts to build a set and just weakens the whole industry. It should be legal to kill joke thieves.”

How do you think of this stuff?
“I am different from you. I am odd. After a while the comedian’s brain becomes trained and just looks for humorous angles to any input it receives. I could be nursing a dying friend and think up a nurse gag – doesn’t mean I’m shallow – it’s just automatic after a while.”

Mike was known for his rapid-fire delivery and vast range of material. He was also a guest on radio shows and would often call in to talkback. This was one of his guest spots on Radio NZ on Christmas Eve in 2008:

https://www.rnz.co.nz/audio/player?audio_id=1824657

One of the items his friends came across after his passing, was a letter he had sent to a womens rights group, requesting information on cultural discrimination against women that is not commonly publicised. He wished to better understand the hidden discrimination that women faced, to incorporate it into his material and raise awareness that way, belying his reputation for being thoroughly unpolitically-correct.

Mike frequently received complaints for his irreverent material which spared no-one.

Typically, Mike revelled in the BSA investigations exonerating him http://mikeloder.com/bsa_complaint.html

A fellow comedian and friend, Mark Scott had this detailed recollection of their time together.

“Mike and I met through our love of stand-up comedy and soon connected with our shared aspirations of becoming prodigious joke writers and comedians of note. This was back in the 90’s when stand-up was just getting off the ground in New Zealand. There were a handful of people doing it and there was still a very healthy cultural cringe associate with NZ comedians. Most relied on lots of swagger and posturing held together with a few well timed swear words, which to be fair, often went down a treat in the pubs to which the form was almost exclusive to. But even then, as a fledgling comic, Mike was writing structured routines, edited down to dense set-ups and rich punchlines. A style he admired in his comic heroes Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Chris Rock and all the comedy superstars of the time. They weren’t superstars for nothing.

When Mike took the stage, which was on crutches back in those early days, he had an ability to immediately set an audience at ease by right of the bat making some self-deprecating joke, mocking the immediate environment or even the microphone stand. “Ladies and gentlemen” as he would present the mic stand, “Naomi Campbell” (or whichever supermodel was in the headlines at the time.)

Mike understood how to get an audience on side and how to hold them there. He understood how jokes work and recognized when a joke was finished or wasn’t. He was not only diligent in writing the joke but also monitoring its performance in front of a live audience and editing it, developing it or cutting it as might be warranted. I don’t think Mike cut much because generally everything he did worked, with is a very unusual trait amongst developing comedians and something which tends to be common to the greats.

He gigged at every opportunity. We performed in the 2000 Adelaide Fringe which I think had three shows running for every resident of Adelaide. We were paying a weekly rate for the venue regardless of how many days we performed so Mike booked us for 28 days straight. It was a pretty exhausting time, the two of us flyering during the day and performing at night. None of the sight-seeing or beach days most of the other acts had scheduled in. The venue itself was a nightmare. It was called the World’s End Cabaret which was this heavy metal pub that appeared to have grudgingly allowed the Fringe Festival to use the back rubbish yard as a venue for fringe shows.

When we arrived a couple of days before the show, tradies (presumably) were laying pavers in the dirt alley so they could put up a tent and throw around some cheap plastic chairs for the patrons to luxuriously enjoy the show from. Throw in – a dangerously rickety temporary stage, wrought iron fence at the back of the “room” open to the street, a door opening from the kitchen spilling bright light over the darkened audience as the chef ran to the freezer to loudly smash bags of ice on the pavers before hauling it back into the kitchen and slamming the door behind him (usually twice per show), the entrance to the space being a tent flap next to the toilets where patrons would loudly chat (though in fairness they were often hard to hear over the heavy metal bands playing), the sounds of smashing glass, jets flying over, a very noisy cricket, one of the alleged pub owners coming in before the show one night as the patrons had just seated themselves and threatening to physically assault Mike, and plenty of stuff I’ve my mind has blocked out – then you have a small insight into the rock and roll lifestyle of touring comedians and in particular, the lengths that Mike was prepared to go to to upskill his joke telling abilities for your viewing pleasure.

I must point out we met with the festival organizer at the time to discuss our venue woes and she was absolutely lovely, but what was done was done and as every space in the entire village, right down to unused wardrobes, then already had a show booked in it, we were stuck with our beloved back-alley tent and resolved to be grateful we weren’t performing one of the serious theatre shows playing in the time slots either side of us that required silence and focus so one could truly appreciate the pathos and suffering the no doubt constantly interrupted actors will have been struggling to portray.

Mike and I had become firm friends and toured 1999 for four months and eight festivals, extending the following year to twenty-one festival runs in eight months, through NZ, Australia, Canada and US. It was an exhausting schedule which Mike had set and done all the major production for. I was the stamp licker (not a euphemism) and doer of donkey work, but Mike did most of the Festival contact, probably so I wouldn’t stuff it up.

It’s hard to impress on someone who’s not been there, the energy required to write, produce, pack up, unpack, make amazing new friends, leave them behind, spend a night on an airport floor after missing a flight connection, spend a night in a café hoping not to get kicked out while waiting for accommodation to become available, spend the day flyering, find the energy to once more extract laughter from a new audience, etc etc. Mike did all this from a wheelchair.”

“I think Mike changed when we eventually wound up in London at the end of our 2000 tour and Mike had booked a gig at the very prestigious Comedy Store on the back of reviews and accolades racked up as a result of all his diligent work and innate talent. This was the moment he would crack the UK comedy scene and his aspirations would become reality.
But when we got there, he was unable to get in with his wheelchair as it was upstairs and he the image of being carried up the stairs by the bouncers didn’t really align with his image of the rising comedy star. He was devastated and became very withdrawn for a number of months on our return back home.”

 

Billy T Award

Until 2001, the Billy T Award was shared between two comedians. It then became a solo award. Mike won the award with Paul Ego.

Mark Scott continues:

“In 2000, Mike won the most coveted comedy award in NZ. The NZ International Comedy Festival Billy T award, named after NZ’s most beloved comedian Billy T James.

After the touring years, Mike continued to produce regular shows that employed the best of local comedy talent.

I hope he’ll always be remembered for not just his ability to write and perform hilarious routines, but also for his tenacity, incredible drive and his giving back to the community, organizing writing groups, mentoring and providing work to other comedians through the gigs he organized.”

What Mark does not mention is an infamous (within the comedy community) prank which Mike played on his fellow comedians. In 2003 Mike sent fake congratulatory letters to two of the nominees for the Award for that year. As a result, he was blacklisted from the NZ International Comedy Festival the following year. As the prank is now indelibly part of NZ’s comedy history and there are still people exercised over the prank, Mike had the last laugh.

 

Licenced Firearms Owners’ Rights

Mike’s keen interest in advocating for the rights of licenced firearms owners began at around the same time as his interest in comedy. Even early on, he was able to obtain mainstream media coverage for the issue. His advocacy for licenced firearms owners’ rights was a constant refrain throughout his life. At that time, he was a member of Auckland Pistol Club, the logo of which can be seen on the jumper he wore in the article.

 

Richard Munt, close friend and proprietor of Serious Shooters in Auckland writes,

“I first met Mike in and around 1991, through the gun trade, he was working at Gun City part time and I used to frequent their old Greenlane Store. Then again through his work with Shooters Rights over the new Arms Regs, then through me taking up Pistol Shooting. We sort of regularly bumped into one another at Gun Shows, Gun Clubs, other Retail Shops and when I started at Serious Shooters he became a regular customer.

I certainly knew of his tireless work on the Firearms Laws and would always keep track of that now I was “in” the trade.

…we would see him more often at shows and at the shop. He was a frequent visitor at the new shop and as life progressed we became much more friendly as mates. Certainly being around Mike more was a good thing, his wit, intelligence and his way of seeing through the bullshit.

6 years ago we just seemed to talk more on Facebook, Emails, Phone etc etc and it just sorted morphed, more so when I move closer to him and had more time available. Dinner at his place with Julian and our regular (kinda), visits to the Schnitzelarium (his words) at Broncos with others became a regular thing.
A deeper friendship, not just over guns, developed, I am sure as many of you know, you get drawn into Mikes life almost naturally, he allows you to and at the same time sucks you in.”

Mike was also involved in the Sporting Shooters Association of NZ (SSANZ), the Antique Arms Association and numerous other sporting and collecting bodies. He founded several shooters rights groups, including the NZ Shooters Rights Association and the Kiwi Gun Blog. He would call in to radio talkback and attempted to rally other members of the legal firearms community to do the same. He was also an avid collector who had to surrender numerous firearms in the 2019 confiscations following prohibition.

Mike’s submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee on changes to NZ’s firearms legislation in April 2019 was a standout demonstration of logic against government agenda. He was also brutally honest in his language.

Mike applied his scathing wit to “experts” summoned by anti-firearms activists and never let an opportunity to mock them go by. He created a series of videos that succinctly shredded their rhetoric and attempted to appeal to logic and reason instead.

Mike applied his written talent to countless letters to politicians of the day, sending in policy proposals, lobbying for law changes, dissecting regulatory flaws and uncovering outright lies.

Art

Much less well-known were Mike’s ventures into comic art.

 

Cats

Mike was fond of all animals but he loved cats above all.

Mark Scott recalls, “When he filled out forms to attend Canadian festivals and they asked if he had any special requests regarding who he might be billeted with (they do that in Canada!) he would usually respond “a cat”.

The personal voicemail message on his mobile invites callers to send him a picture of a cat. Friends were often told that if they annoyed him, they could make it up to him by sending him pictures of their cat. He would send them numerous cat pictures in return.

Over the years, Mike fostered numerous cats and kittens, often neighbourhood strays that he would befriend and then adopt. 

Personal Life

In Mike’s words, “I was born in Greenwich, London on October 3rd 1971. My parents were expecting me so it was nothing dodgy. I grew up in New Zealand. This was paid for by my father who worked for Nestle, the chocolate people. They were very cheap and I got no free chocolate unless my dad visited the factory. Then I got sacks of the disabled hunchback chocolates – the kind that had an extra almond in them, etc.”

Mike would invent numerous ways to find amusement in everyday items and prank friends.

Over the years, Mike had several long-term relationships with various women. Women were drawn to him by his sense of humour and charm and he adored them. His father fondly recalls phoning Mike while he was on tour in Canada and having the phone answered in the small hours of the morning by a woman, who then immediately handed the phone to Mike. Mike’s father says proudly that as much success as he had had with women throughout his own life, Mike surpassed that. That was a personal tribute that did not make it to the formal setting of Mike’s memorial service.

Richard Munt adds a recollection:

“… his delight at Krispy Kreme opening and we went there first day. He said, push me up the front and we both cut the line. I was more astonished that he allowed me to push the chair than the audacity of him using his disability to his advantage. He giggled and said, this is important stuff.”

Richard’s memories of his friendship with Mike was typical of that for all his close friends:

“A visit to his house just casually to drop Milk off when he needs it for his tea would usually take and hour or so. Phone calls, texts or DM’s about what he was working on at the time could arrive at any time.
Just to listen to him read something to you he was working on and ask does that sound right would always lead to another lump of time gone, but it was never a waste of time, it was always interesting. On many subjects, Comedy, Politicians, Media life in general. Always intelligent, always funny.
Miss you mate.”

Mike’s professional comedy website is still live at Mikeloder.com