JUST FOR LAUGHS
There are now officially no new airport, airplane or Barack Obama jokes left to be told.
Like a ship passing in five nights, the first Chicago version of the Just for Laughs festival has departed, leaving venues dark, funny bones tickled, two-drink minimums met.
More than 100 acts spread out across the city, trying to make something original out of universal experiences. There were successes and failures, chronicled below and in Saturday’s roundup, but the festival itself came off surprisingly smooth for a first-time venture. The thought here, as we bid the fest farewell for now, is to offer three tips for improvement next year:
*Fine, TBS is a sponsor and so is Twix, the Mars Inc. candy bar. Bravo for the free candy at several sites, but sticking logos everywhere, even amid the ornate plaster-work at the Vic, is like putting pig ears on a beautiful, lipsticked woman.
*If a performance is primarily a TV taping, and the audience’s needs are going to be subverted to the TV producers’ needs, don’t charge admission.
*Lose the cheesy announcer, who seemed to follow me from show to show. And spare the TBS commercials: Nothing you can do will make Jim Jefferies’ audience tune in to George Lopez’s late-night show.
Lisa Lampanelli
Getting away with the most outrageous ethnic slurs is Lisa Lampanelli’s shtick, and she’s very good at it.
In the first of two shows Saturday at the Chicago Theater, the comic and celebrity-roast fixture, fresh off of her first HBO special, let the over-the-top characterizations and the grandiose insults fly.
There was a line about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, an insinuation about Oprah, a suggestion that she’ll adopt a mentally disabled child to save on college expenses. What’s interesting about Lampanelli is the nimble dance she does to prove that even though she’s being obnoxious, she’s still likable.
She characterizes herself just as harshly, as outrageously promiscuous, and she periodically pulls back to make sure no one’s feeling genuinely hurt, all the while congratulating the audience on its extreme nastiness for not objecting to this stuff.
Even in so large a theater, with so much vitriol flying around, Lampanelli creates an environment that’s almost warm: People actually raise their hands to be recognized as members of a minority group that the comic can then abuse.
Her point, I think, is that the stereotypes about gays, blacks, women, Asians, Latinos and Jews are ridiculous, and, by repeating them, she can pummel them into submission. But once the giddy delight the audience took in her transgressions subsided, the hourlong set began to feel like it was running in place. More abuse, slightly different terms.
— Steve Johnson
Best of Sketchfest
The Chicago Sketchfest, the annual gathering of scripted silliness, played a role in the weekend festivities. Six audience favorites from January had reprise performances at i.O.. And for good reason: These groups from New York, Toronto and Chicago were airtight as ensembles, having trimmed their scenes of excess fat. They were tenderloins of hilarity, one could say.
Some were better than others, of course. Team Submarine is a New York-by-way-of-Chicago duo that made inane banter endlessly interesting. The show actually had a narrative arc. It opened the set by throwing out candy to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy,” then threw out slices of bread, potatoes, two TiVo’s and a Roomba (they took everything back, alas). It ended with the whole audience on stage, and the two performers in the audience.
Chicago’s Brick reunited for the festival, and the scene using only the dubbed-voice of the CTA announcer drew the biggest laughs of the night. (This is Wilson. This is Howard.) Hey You Millionaires played a game show on stage, airing badly-acted scenes from movies and asking, “Is this acting from a Christian apocalypse film or soft-core pornography?”
Of course, you could’ve instead seen the “Best of’s” at midnight Thursday and Friday. Sketch demigod Bob Odenkirk hosted a revue featuring the best bits from all six acts, condensed into a 90-minute show.
— Kevin Pang
Jimmy Fallon
After initially feeling fresh, Jimmy Fallon’s “Saturday Night Live” news reading began to seem more interested in courting the camera than delivering jokes. His new late-night TV show is intriguing for its embrace of the Web, but whether it will work out remains an open question.
Yet, Fallon in concert, before an audience Saturday that was, by and large, smitten, was actually a low-key charmer. Like a one-man excursion through YouTube, he jumped from songs played on guitar to stories to audience interplay. Nothing was particularly awesome, but, taken together, it added up to an amiable, winning 60 minutes: impressions of famous comics, a comic song (“Car Wash for Peace”), a bit about wedding DJs, impressions of famous singers, and, yes, a version of his “SNL” “Barry Gibb Talk Show.”
It all ended with a semi-serious version of the 1980s hit “Come On Eileen.” What looked like self-satisfied mugging on “SNL” played as boyish charm on the stage, and Fallon won at least one former fan back.
— S.J.
Late Night Late Show Reunion
The Late Night Late Show was a highlight of i.O.’s catalog a few years back. And in one star-studded reunion, we saw why.
Perhaps they pulled out all the stops to make this “episode” of a fake talk show extra noteworthy, and perhaps having David Cross make a surprise appearance as lead guest made the crowd applaud extra hard. We’re not sure how this measures to the original (it’s been so long), but this 90-minute midnight show rollicked along, replete with the usual host-sidekick-bandleader-angry-network-exec banter. Parts of the show dragged a bit, but still managed to crescendo to a Bollywood dance-off.
— K.P.
Jim Jefferies
Of the comics I saw during the festival, Jim Jefferies is the one I would go see again, on my own time and dime.
He comes out looking like not much: a lumpy pug of a man in too-skinny jeans, clutching his Jack Daniels and Coke like it means a little too much to him.
But the Australian who just got the HBO-special anointment is a masterful storyteller. His soulful vulnerability, his willingness to put himself naked on the examining table before us, belies the soccer-hooligan appearance. He’ll slip a devastating line in as an aside — “my parents were pigs as well” — in the middle of an unrelated story, the sign of a man with material to spare.
But the center of his act is the great set piece, delivered with such flow that the audience never feels the script in the way.
There’s one on his dad finding his porn stash, one on taking a paraplegic friend to a prostitute, and an absolutely amazing story about a childhood scouting incident and the thing his father, as a funny man, couldn’t help saying: “I wondered how you got all those badges.”
“He’s holding his molested child,” Jefferies said, “and his brain was going, ‘Say it! It’s a good one!” Comedy is risk-taking, said Jefferies, and that made his dad a true comic. Like father, like son.
— S.J.
Russell Peters
Friday’s comedy sampler at the Chicago Theater was hosted by Russell Peters, a first-rate comedian not shy about mining racial and cultural stereotypes for material. Audience members up front were subjected to his scrutiny: “What style of Asian are you?” (Peters is Indian.) And upon encountering a man who identified himself as black Mexican — Peters dubbed his willing victim a “Blaxican” — he pondered their combined ethnic labor quotient: “Do you realize that between the two of us, we’re making half the sneakers in the world?”
— Nina Metz
Patrice Oneal
Patrice Oneal, the XL-size comedian from New Jersey, was nothing short of an XL-size revelation. Donning a Panama hat and perched on his stool onstage at the Lakeshore Theater, Oneal hit the bullet points of stand-up fodder — relationships, the economy, Michael Vick, being “gangsta” — but largely avoided bits and easy punch lines.
— K.P.
Bill Engvall
Bill Engvall is the Blue Collar Comedy member that’s not the redneck, the drunk or the cable guy. Engvall’s the one with his own sitcom on TBS, the one where he plays a father and husband, with the hilarious particulars of fatherhood and matrimonial life crammed into 30-minute episodes.
Engvall took his the “I love you, honey, but what’s wrong with you woman!” act to The Vic Theatre on Saturday, where he taped a TV special in front of a decidedly redneck-less crowd. Exuding a genial, everyman vibe, Engvall touched on marriage, advancing age and colonoscopies with a conversational, non-dirty tone. The jokes fell along the lines of a bunch of middle-age men walking into a night club that “looked like they were filming a Flomax commercial” — which is to say, suburbia comedy. Edgy it ain’t, but funny it was.
— K.P.
Comedy You Can Believe In with David Alan Grier
At this show Friday, we learned we were in Chicago and that, apparently, the chief we now hail to hails from here. Also: Airlines, can you believe them?
The marquee comic was host, telling a decent joke or two, then introducing one of six stand-ups to do a short set. Only Mark Curry and, to a lesser extent, Marina Franklin showed signs of being more than just generic. Plus the show was a TV taping, leaving the theater audience unable to buy drinks and urged not to use the bathrooms until the end. But, you know, thanks for buying a ticket and have a great time!
— S.J.
