Rubber band boy Shay Horay makes his way into the Guinness Book of Records

Talking of boy wonders: Shay Horay is known as Rubber Band Boy, or the Master of Rubberbandology, or The One-Man Rubber Band. He was my last interview before returning from Aotearoa-New Zealand (as it is now coming to be known). “My career?” he said when I asked him about how he became a comedian. “Wrapping rubber bands around my face. That’s what I do. I’m in the Guinness Book of Records! In one minute, I got 78 rubber bands on my face. That was my record.”

Turns out Horay has performed all over the world, everywhere from the UK to Canada to Italy to China, just to stretch rubber bands around his face. Now he’s planning on California. I ask how he happened. “I kept getting these teachers’ reports when I was a kid, like: ‘Shay is loud, easily distracted, and a bit of a clown.’ I thought, Well, I’ve already got the references, I may as well do the career. So I went to a school that taught acrobatics and circus. Clowning was one of the major subjects.”

And the rubber band idea? “My thing was that I needed a hook. Like a song needs a hook. Just being funny was like, yep, I can do that. But I needed a hook that people would associate with me. So I was playing a game of pool at Dux Delux, which was a pub in the Arts Center in Christchurch before the second earthquake destroyed it. I was on a winning streak, and my mate who worked behind the bar thought, I’ll try and put him off. And he pinged a rubber band, and it hit me in the head. I grabbed the rubber band, put the cue down, stretched the rubber band over my face, and then kept playing. So now I’m over on the other side of the table and snap! I get hit again. I put the cue down, and I put the rubber band on, until I had about ten rubber bands on my face. And I still won the game, and the guy I was playing with said, ‘Next thing, you’ll be doing this as one of your comedy routines.’ And so I got a takeaway of beer, went home, sat down in the bathroom, put all of the rubber bands on, and developed a routine. And the very next Tuesday, I started it. It’s essentially doing comedy while putting rubber bands all over your face. That’s it!”

As for the date with Guinness glory, “That was on a TV show in New Zealand. And then someone beat me, but I still got flown to Milan to do a TV show over there. I just had to put rubber bands over my face. This was the one for the Italian Guinness Book of Records, the most in one minute. In one minute, my record was still 78. It didn’t really look that great, but it got me my flight to Milan. And my girlfriend got flown over there as well. I felt like a superstar! I’m in The Book. I’ve got a medal, somewhere.”

He has been riding this rather specialized career for over a decade now, and he has to admit that he’s kind of stretching his luck. “But before I killed rubber band boy, I created an obnoxious character called Keith Preene. Kind of inspired by [Saturday Night Live star] Andy Kaufman.” It was turned into a TV show, and Shay Horay now lives in a million-dollar house overlooking the Pacific. “Uh, that’s a million New Zealand dollars,” he points out. “You fellers should knock off half if you’re coming over. Still, not bad for a humble rubber band boy.”