Thomas T.
Yelp
I'm shocked that there are recent positive reviews. The only people laughing when I attended were friends of the cast members.
This show bills itself as a zany screwball time-ticking approach to sketch comedy. I say, don't bother with the two-minute-per-sketch format if you manage to make two minutes feel like an eternity. I only laughed once, when a chair that wasn't supposed to topple over, did.
I'm going to review as many of the sketches as I can remember so that ideally you never need to experience this for yourself. But if you want to save yourself the time from reading this, just picture that one Theater Kid you had in your high school or college class that always had a self-important, ultimately pointless story to share about his/her/their very VIP self. That's what this was, for two hours, in two-minute segments each time. Alternately, imagine those two Saturday Night Live sketches "High School Theater Show." But imagine the cast members were not in on the joke. Or if confronted about it, they'd just insist it was ironic.
The so-edgy-you-might-cut-yourself decision to shave off a couple minutes at the end to represent how school kids will be lose their school hours is rendered no longer relevant by the latest CPS decision, so hopefully they have taken this out. But the political gestures scattered throughout the sketches seemed to scream, 'We're not political enough? Oh, we'll show you political!' It was the equivalent of if liberalism was this giant [unmentionable here] that someone sprouted and decided to wave around in your face for the whole show. Maybe slap you with it if you managed to forget that the cast members were woke. The Bernie Utopia sketch was similarly annoying to watch and dated. Like a poor man's Saturday Night Live attempt.
The sketch with the hand-prints and the story about a hunting stepfather exemplified the problem with many of the other sketches. There was a lot of expectation and emotional build-up; a skilled sketch comedian would respect the audience enough to give some pay off. Instead, the sketch was a cast member rambling for two minutes about deer guts and then screaming TIME before you could question the point behind those two minutes you'll never get back. Ostrich Stitches similarly suffered from I-Want-To-Do-Slam-Poetry syndrome. If you want to make short skits or comedy sketches, I'd highly recommend watching some Key & Peele sketches to see how timing, managing audience expectations and fulfilling or subverting them, and character development can go a long way in the span of a few minutes.
The pool sketch, meanwhile, had a point, but whenever sketches had Points, they thwacked you over the head with it. The point of that sketch was Look At This Awkward, Uncomfortable Moment In My Important Life. It's the type of thing you might permit a friend to relate to you in confidence, but you don't really need to pay money to see.
The "NOW SWIM" sketch was absurd and occasionally bordered towards genuinely humorous, but the entire audience took away nothing from watching that (splashing a lot of water isn't all that funny or creative or thought-provoking). We're stupider for having wasted the brain cells on watching it and trying to find some meaning in it, if anything.
The running with the chaser sketch was what I imagine would have happened if someone got really high and decided to make a dad joke into a two-minute sketch. As with many high-deas, this one is a lot less exciting to experience as a sober audience member. Similarly, the Rapunzel sketch and the pork rind/hand lotion dilemma had a single, banal punchline.
Night terrors was forgivable only because it was early on in the night when it happened, before I figured out that every sketch would make you think there was some clever ending that would be revealed, when there actually was no pay-off, no delivery, no Amazon Prime by the time they screamed Time. Similarly, getting a male-identifying audience member into heels to score a touchdown had no clever ending either. It's 2017; we're all adults who watch Rupaul every Friday; gender subversion isn't innovative or funny.
The only touching sketch involving forcing a sick old man to drink water until he died. Good old waterboarding.
All in all, I'd recommend watching this if you've never had the unique experience of sitting through a child's magic show or a child's DIY circus performance or their self-made play or poetry-reading or any variant of sitting politely to experience a few hours of something constantly trying but always failing to be art. It might have been great fun for the people putting on the performance, but it's not exciting for the audience. This comparison might not do enough justice to children's performances. For the Briony Tallises out there, I apologize.
