Going into the ComedySoc: Double Bill, I have to admit I was a bit nervous. Shockingly I thought it might not actually be funny. I had horrifying scenes of ending up writing this review and trying to add gloss everywhere. Fortunately, I needn’t have worried and haven’t had to gloss anything because it was actually laugh-out-loud hilarious!
Things got off to a bouncy start with host and MC George Hughes, who romped through a few funny student gags and a few well-chosen ‘hype the crowd’ tactics. Blaine Kenneally opened the stand-up with a pun-heavy set, heavy on intelligent wordplay and comedic storytelling. He had a particularly great line about accidentally murdering some ducks that was unfortunately ruined with a gasped ‘noooo’ by my companion for the evening Helena Horton, who spent most of the night bobbing hysterically like a walrus having a particularly satisfying belly rub and chortling with laughter. Clearly, that one cider had gone to her head.
Next up was Stephen Harper. Confident and with a set loosely structured around childhood and general university tropes, Harper also made more use of actions to humorous effect in a skit about The Eiffel Tower. He was followed swiftly by possibly the most laid-back of the lot Sam Went, whose politics heavy set poked fun at his self-professed socialist leanings and involved at one point, doling out of sponges.
Last on the bill was ComedySoc Chair Lewis Dunn, who delivered probably the most polished and entertaining of the sets on offer from the stand-ups. There was a fabulous recurring skit with a fibre bar and he closed the set with a superb rhyme section, with the highlight of, “NOTHING RHYMES WITH ORANGE.”
The second half of the Double Bill was The Shambles, ComedySoc’s improvisation group. Their half of the show was focused around 5 different games, each of which had a different flavour and all of which involved audience involvement, although the strongest of the five were 4 Square and 99 Red Balloons.
For the former, three members of The Shambles stood on stage and rotated in 3 pairings of 2. One pairing were given a job (butcher), one an animal (originally lemurs, but this became too many lemurs) and lastly an event (first haunting). This was carried out with suitable aplomb by all, with a sausage-based disaster at the butchers, explosion of lemurs at someone’s house and the first-haunting all eventually neatly tying together and with the players carrying it off without a single ‘urm’ or ‘ahh’ between them.
99 Red Balloons involved the entire group. Given a plethora of suggestions from the audience, the group would come forward with a joke based on the format of ’99 X walked into a x…’ and see where it went from there. Tempting fate, Helena put forward ‘York Vision’, for which we received a roasting when it eventually came up. ‘99 York Visions walk into a supermarket and pick up a packet of pork pies labelled ‘pork pie’s’ and find nothing wrong with it.’ For a moment, I seriously considered scrapping my positive review and unleashing murderous bile and damnation upon ComedySoc. Fortunately, a girl with excellent taste soothed our wounds. ‘99 York Visions walk into a greasy spoon café, but there’s a nicer place across the road. However on closer inspection it turns out to be pretentious as shit and Nouse are in there, so they stick with the greasy spoon.’
A fabulous night of comedy and an education that York actually boasts some top notch comedy of its own. Maybe next year YUSU won’t bother outsourcing for the Comedy Night?
