Wednesday, July 15, 2009
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Group's outrageous streak but tamer but at times, it delivers its finest crafted and performed comedy in years
Critical Mass
Campbell Webster
The Guardian
Across the street from the show that does not offend, yet does (both homosexuals and homophobes, it seems), is a show that also often offends, and intends to.
Shock and awful-gross has been a primary fuel of the comedy troupe Sketch 22 for six years now, so nudity is present and potty-mouths and potty-bodies abound.
But where in previous years much of what was offered as disgusting humour had people leaving, not laughing, this year's offering has some enormous laughs and a good bunch of twitters (all puns intended) along the way.
Sketch 22's outrageous streak is possibly tamer than in previous incarnations, as counterintuitive as that may sound, but it's a great stride forward in that it delivers, at times, its finest crafted and performed comedy in years.
Sketch 22 approaches the quality of its ancestors of over a decade ago, when the Off Stage Theatre Comedy and Annekenstein set a high water mark in recent Prince Edward Island sketch comedy. Sketch 22 includes Rob MacDonald, Dennis Trainor, Andrew Sprague, Lennie MacPherson and Graham Putnam.
"Get in, get out," a prominent Canadian sketch comedian once observed, meaning simply that great short scene comedy is the haiku of funny-land; sparse, complete and not a wasted micron of material.
It needs to establish the world of each sketch instantly and completely, the characters must be clear from the git-go, and it has end a millisecond before the air starts to seep out of a scene, treating the audience as medallists at the Attention Deficit Disorder Olympics.
In this regard, this year's Sketch 22 has some work to do.
The show is uneven, which, to be fair, is almost required for a first mounting of new sketch material.
It starts out with an astoundingly funny scene, built cleverly around a remarkably simple and hilarious piece of costuming or a prop (it is a bit of both - see the sentence about tittering above). This bodes well until the second scene, "Two Shot", which has a great premise but meanders on and on, well past its funny best-before due date.
The up-and-down, sometimes hilarious, sometimes confusing, sometimes inspired, and sometimes unfocused writing, continues throughout the show, the sum of the parts is a show that can be great once a good scalpel is taken to the existing material.
This is part of the craft of sketch comedy in any event, and the boys (all these sketch comedians are boys, and all male sketch comedians are boys until they are 90 or so) need to dig in and start slicing up their show, to mix metaphors as they often do.
A common problem is when sketches meander in and out of different genres, such as in "Ken's Corner GAs". (Is this sketch a send-up of Canadian sit-coms, or Island social retail culture, or a voyage to the land of the absurdly stupid?)
Zig-gagging like this is playing catch-and-release with the audience, who have to change gears to keep laughing. Still, what is interesting about the weaker scenes is that most of them are probably fixable, being largely strong conceptually, if not initially well executed.
Where the greatest promise lies is in some of the video sketches. They make up about a third of the evening, and by necessity appear to have been more carefully crafted than the live work. A couple of them are almost breathtaking, including an early video featuring an obsessed server of a nearby house full of ferile ... people.
This is a scene about very bad neighbours. Very, very, very bad neighbours. (And it is also, to great relief, a successful example of quite literal potty humour, gross-out stuff which feeds the hilarity of the scene, rather than simply dropping a turd on the stage in the hopes that poop by itself is funny.)
This and other videos portions of the show prove that these comedy boys, our comedy boys, have a good deal of the craft at their sticky fingertips. Wielding their scatological sketch scalpel is something they could be, and are capable of, doing.
nice work so far, potty-mouths. Keep at it.
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Sketch22 Media Contact - Jason Rogerson, (902) 368-2392 /
jason@sketch22.ca
