Urzila Carlson is surprisingly chipper for a person who has spent this year in back-to-back COVID-19 lockdowns.
"There's worse things that could have happened than staying at home in comfortable clothes!" she tells Newshub.
The comedian toughed out the Sydney lockdown earlier this year before returning home, completing two weeks in MIQ and being rewarded with exactly one day of freedom before Auckland was plunged into its own lockdown.
"Lockdowns have been the bread in my sandwich - I make quarantine the filling," she says cheerfully.
"That one day was enough to get new underpants. I mean really, why else are you going to the shops? It's just to waste money."
Carlson has a philosophical approach to the pandemic: Not entirely unlike the wars of our grandparents' generation, this is our lifetime's "one big thing" we have to tackle so that we can one day freak our kids out with stories about how crazy it was.
And when that time comes, we'll only need to turn to the deeply relatable 'Lockumentary' clips Carlson's been sharing on social media that chronicle collective pandemic experiences around homeschooling, desperately needing a haircut and the emotional rollercoaster that has become grocery shopping. She also likes to go "fishing for f**kwits" by wading into discussions around divisive topics like vaccination and Government restrictions.
Warning: The below video features strong language.
"I wasn't even using bait! He just kept trying to jump in the boat!" she recalls of one particularly xenophobic, homophobic 'fish' that came biting before Twitter removed its account.
Perhaps the secret to Carlson's sunny disposition amid the madness is the regular airing of grievances that happens on her podcast, That's Enough Already, where she and her famous mates discuss what irritates them - or "shits them to death" - the most.
Russell Howard, Laura Daniel, Chris Parker, Madeleine Sami, Andy Lee, Des Bishop, Rhys Darby, Melanie Bracewell and many more: They've all got something to bitch about. Often, they've got several things.
Carlson asks them what pisses them off about other people and themselves, and it's an instant, funny catharsis for all involved - listener included.
"I am a very positive person but if there is something that irritates me or 'shits me', I'm going to let it out," Carlson explains.
"I'm not going to let something negative make my whole day suck, I'm just going to acknowledge that it's negative, I'm going to call it out and I'm going to move right on."
The podcast traverses slow-walkers, people who stand up too early to disembark a plane, internet trolls and many more gripes, but Newshub had to know what Carlson's current top three looked like.
- Inconsiderate people; the kind that panic buy toilet paper in a pandemic - "what are the rest of us supposed to do at this point? None of your neighbors can wipe."
- People that put their bag of dog poo in your empty wheelie bin before you've brought it back in from the street
- People not getting vaccinated - "you'd think it would be higher up, but it's not."
Carlson is obviously driven by a motivation to find the funny in every situation - even those that many of us find sad, scary or just annoying.
While her podcast is clear proof of this, perhaps the most irrefutable evidence came when she badly injured herself in a stunt-gone-wrong while filming Taskmaster NZ. Even having given herself a concussion and broken her collarbone, she could think only of making sure the cameras filmed the ambulance leaving "because it would be funny".
She ended up needing surgery to put a plate and eight screws in her shoulder.
"This is how you know it's in your blood: I could feel them pulling the pipe out of my throat as I was coming out of the anesthetic, and I was making jokes with the nurses and doctor. We were just laughing the whole time," she says.
"That just kind of cements it - it's in my soul. I just want to crack people up."
That's Enough Already is available to listen to on all major podcast platforms.
