Remembering the comedy and courage of Dai Henwood

Detailed summary

New Zealand comedian, television personality and adored husband, father, son and friend to many Dai Henwood passed away on Tuesday at the age of 48 at Auckland Hospital. Photo /…

Dai Henwood was a funny guy, hilarious, often foul-mouthed and frequently irreverent. He filled comedy clubs. He made bonkers television shows. He helped start a renaissance in New Zealand comedy. He was a comics’ comic, but also one of the best-known and most-loved funnymen of his generation.

But in his final years, after he went public in January 2023 about the incurable bowel cancer that ended his life on November 10, another Dai Henwood emerged.

This guy was funny, too. But as we first saw in an emotional television interview in 2023 and later in Live And Let Dai, a documentary series he made about his illness, he was also courageous in the face of a death sentence, unsparing in his honesty about his hopes and fears, and unselfish in opening up his life to New Zealanders in the hope that his story might help others facing similar circumstances.

In the interview with his great friend and fellow entertainer Jaquie Brown for Three’s The Project in 2023, he at times seemed remarkably sanguine about his approach to his cancer. He refused to see it as an injustice, to allow it to become his entire identity, or to spend what time remained to him feeling sorry for himself.

“The universe doesn’t have fair and unfair, it has events,” he told Brown. “And how you respond to the events defines you, not the event. Cancer doesn’t define me. How I respond to cancer defines me.”

It was inevitable that Dafydd Morgan Henwood would be smart but also a hell of a show-off. Born in Wellington in 1978 to Dame Carolyn Henwood, then a prominent lawyer and later a Youth Court judge, and Ray Henwood, a scientist turned professional stage and screen actor, he was surrounded by performance and theatre almost as soon as he was born.

In an interview with me for the New Zealand Herald in 2015, he said his parents’ involvement with Wellington’s Circa Theatre, which they helped found, as well as his Welsh-born father’s starring role in the much-loved 1980s television sitcom Gliding On, meant the…

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Opening of the article, excerpted from NZ Herald. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.