I think my favourite comedian (comedians) as it’s a duo, are Tim and Eric.
Milo McCabe
They take ideas that would look incredibly unlikely in print and turn them into even more ridiculous reality, then make them veer off in other ways that you could never predict. They have a huge output of sketches online and it all seems completely stream of consciousness. There is a high fail rate but for every two that don’t land the third just destroys me more than anything else.
More than with anyone else that I can think of, their output seems completely free of any external influence (producers, directors) and as a result you get this stuff that if feels like they are making purely to make themselves laugh. I think that gives their work a strange (in every sense of the word) intimacy. They will hire the worst actors they can to play supporting parts in their sketches, bad in very specific and natural ways. Most of them probably aren’t actors.
There is one sketch that I can’t stop watching. It’s basically a spoof advert for a board game called ‘It’s Not Jackie Chan’ where players have to name things that aren’t Jackie Chan and it veers off in an odd direction after the first thirty seconds. I shared it online and people hated it but it absolutely kills me.
With a lot of comedy, particularly sketch, you get a sense of where a premise is going and as a performer yourself you will sometimes watch and get a sense of the editing/writing process. I think the fact that I find it difficult to picture how the ideas are conjured up and the process by which they are subverted and where they eventually end up makes them a lot more interesting to me.
Also I think because there is such a high hit/miss rate with these guys (with me personally) there is an odd sense of partial reinforcement that keeps me coming back. I’ll watch eight sketches, love three of them and five will leave me cold. In an odd way, I think it’d get boring if every one of them was great. Would kind of ruin the surprise a little!
Title Of Show: Milo McCabe as Troy Hawke in ‘Tiles of the Unexpected!’
Venue: Underbelly – Dexter Room
Time: 5.30pm
Dates: 3rd – 25th August (except 12th)
Preview: 31st July – 2nd August