After my first dip in the veritable hilarious pool of Comedy-Soc a week ago, I dived head first into the second with an entire night devoted to The Shambles, Comedy Soc’s improvisation group and was even more excited by the promise of games delivered by the random selection of a roulette board.
The lead game, and one of the strongest was ‘Musical’ – the recreation of an opening song from a West-End Style musical based upon a single profession. In this case the chosen profession was a teacher. Lines ranged from references to examples of teachers in literature, ‘It’s not like Matilda and I wouldn’t recommend being a teacher as a career builder,’ to a teacher with a penchant for gourmet stationary and lastly, and perhaps most weirdly, yet hilariously ‘I’m a caterpillar inside the teacher’s apple.’
The MC, Edward Greenwood sprang onto the stage to move us on swiftly, stopping briefly to deliver that pun of puns ‘I hope tonight won’t be too shamoblic’ before moving us onto our next game ‘meanwhile / sing it.’ Putting the Shambles to the test, the audience were asked for a non-platonic relationship (dinosaur and dinosaur handler) to form the basis for the game. At certain points in the scene the MC could shout out ‘meanwhile’ moving the scene to a new location with new players, and then pounce on a turn of phrase, declaring ‘sing it’ and producing a song. It included such towering lyrical masterpieces as ‘That Charming Lizard Left Me’ and ‘Evolutionarily that could be right’.
The highest level of audience interaction came with the sublimely surreal ‘What’s My Line’, which focused upon suggestions placed by an audience into a hat. Give the setting of a volcano crater, the two Shambles Members were off, in one rapidly descended from a volcanic exploration for a country to the setting up of a Lesbian bar contaminated with asbestos aimed at muscling in on territory claimed by Mars. It was also punctuated by the key health and safety rule of not using potatoes for hard-hats.
Perhaps the highlight of the evening was ‘Heroes & Villains’. The lead villain ‘Sergeant Mispronunciation’, a sinister interpretation of the Policeman from Allo’ Allo’ had his designs on stealing all the ice cream, with the help of his sidekick Youtube Acoustic Covers Boy. Somehow between the declaration of ensuring the plan would “run smoothly,” and Youtube Acoustic Covers Boy’s threat of wearing a perma-smile for the entire affair I didn’t hold out much hope for our heroes. Fortunately Sergeant Scouse proved me wrong, threatening to “fucking batter your head in.” He almost did as well, had it not been for the ineptness of his sidekick Forget Where Your Legs Are Boy, who proceeded to flail uselessly for much of the piece and eventually be won over by Sergeant Mispronunciation’s subtlest power: persuasion.
The Shambles closed the set with ‘Two Rooms’, something the MC warned would be a bit of an odd ending but actually capped off an evening of resolute entertainment. The sketch was there are two rooms on stage, but you can only hear what’s going on in one at one point. This was one of those sketches where you could never tell what was actually going on, other than the fact that we were in a Sea-Life Centre. Two keepers in one room were arguing about the antics of a Seal in the other room, who had not only pulled a gun on one of them but had also hidden all his balls for his show. The traumatised keeper was obviously a bit concerned by what the seal was doing and even more so when the seal started fishing for children with a cat. He then proceeded to descend into insanity and the other one caused a PR incident by dropping the F-Bomb in front of the children while trying to reason with the wayward Seal, but fortunately won the children around with oceanographical mumbo-jumbo, “A fucking is a type of porpoise!” Things then plunged off the bonkers end of the spectrum, as the now insane zookeeper was bio-engineered into a whale. With that the Shambles capped off another evening that demonstrates they’re not only outrageously funny but also a bit bonkers, which is the perfect combination for an evening of escape from the swirling cacophony of university.