Impressions from Saturday at the Milwaukee Comedy Festival

The Milwaukee Comedy Fest has rolled into Next Act Theatre this weekend. I checked out the festival on its third evening. Here are a few impressions. 

THE 2PM SHOW: 

The Saturday afternoon program opened with stand-up by a guy from Cincinnati, Ohio named Mark Tabor. He's a tall, affable guy who does observational humor. Nice guy. Humorous. Some of his stuff was almost kind of funny. 

Tabor went on to host the show, introducing both of the other acts, which made for a nice atmosphere. Tabor was excellent as a host because he had a natural presence. So often a host tries way too hard to make an impression And the whole thing falls apart. Tabor did a good job.

The improv act for the show was Chicago musical improv group Mansical. 

A woman on keyboard backs up a group of guys who do a series of musical shorts. More misses than hits here, but that might have been the lazy matinee atmosphere. The best bit was a piece in which the group did a self-referential improv song about the nature of improv. Kind of clever. Seeing a group like this try the musical improv thing really made me appreciate the technical cohesion of Milwaukee's T.I.M.: The Improvised Musical which takes the time to craft a single long form piece of improvised musical theatre. Musical theatre is nothing if not long-winded and to ignore the excessive length as a subject of ridicule seems to me to be missing much of the point. Doing musical shorts makes the show feel much more heavily-rooted in improv than a love of the musical theatre format we get with T.I.M. Still, Mansical had its moments.

The Saturday matinee show ended with Canadian sketch comedy group Cash Grab. Pretty standard sketch comedy stuff by a group of guys. Much like Mansical, Cash Grabs best stuff addressed the fourth wall and went self-referential. Though I didn't find any of it to be particularly funny, I love how casual they were about making reference to the basic narrative limitations of sketch comedy. Very cool group to slide into the Fest from parts North. And that's important. Because if you can't be funny in sketch comedy, at least have the decency to be cool about the way you're doing it. And the attitude of Cash Grab had the casual coolness factor onstage with style to spare. Fun stuff even though I didn't really laugh.

THE 7:30 PM SHOW: 

The 7:30 pm show opened with the stand-up of Dobie Maxwell from Milwaukee. I'm sure I've seen this guy perform before. He's been doing stand-up for kind of a long time. I checked him out online to refresh my memory. There was YouTube footage of him performing in Salt Lake City in 2006. It was standard stand-up comic schtick. And then I saw him perform live. And he was doing some of the same jokes. He's been doing some of the same jokes for seven years. At least. That's not funny. It's actually kind of depressing. But it's not like Maxwell isn't really good at delivering those jokes. It's very slickly-presented hack stand-up comedy. With a presentation like that I'm sure he'd do really good in sales . . . I could picture him as a life insurance salesman. He's got a nice stage presence and he knows how to deliver. He'd make a great salesman--the type of guy who knows a fe w jokes to make someone comfortable and close the sale. But any self-respecting stand-up comic is going to come up with new material once every few years at least. 

The 7:30 pm show continued with improv comedy team Jack & the Wolf. Two guys. They take one suggestion and do a series of short improv bits using the suggestion as a springboard. Like any improv, it's got its weak moments, but Jack & the Wolf have been working together for long enough to have worked up a pretty decent stage chemistry. Their signature this past evening seemed to be a propensity for letting a bit play itself out until it felt like it was dead in the water . . . then one of them would pounce on it out of nowhere with a reasonably clever punchline. It was kind of like watching the improv version of a trapeze act. One comic would launch into the air in some direction with a certain amount of comic momentum, which would inevitably start to fall apart and just as the whole thing looked like it was going to lose its charm, either Jack or the Wolf would save the moment by saying something clever and quite forceful. A fun show even if it wasn't particularly funny.

The 7:30 pm show ended with a performance by Chicago sketch comedy group The Comic Thread. Last year they did a set that featured some truly brilliant moments. And while their work this year was more than a bit less inspired, the audience reaction was quite intense and they managed more than a few moments of very well-executed comedy. The best might have been a sketch involving Nicholas DeGrazia playing a theatre professor beginning a long, stuffy lecture on drama only to be confronted by a woman in the audience who has often been married to him. Like all the best sketch comedy, the Comic Thread's set was a pretty wide spectrum of different styles of humor--from extremely low brow stuff to some more nontraditional offbeat stuff. Last year the set was far more offbeat and as a result a lot more interesting to me. This year's set from the Thread was more weighted towards the standard lowbrow end of standup comedy and as a result it didn't appeal to me nearly as much as their offering from last year. The Comic Thread is really good at delivering comedy of any kind, which means that even when the stuff isn't terribly inspired, its delivered remarkably well and you can't avoid having a good time. 

The Milwaukee Comedy Festival rolls into its final day today with a pair of shows including the 2pm Teen Comedy show with nothing but improv from a group of comics too young to fall back on the sorts of popular adult-themed comedic crutches that are so commonly found in adult improv. That's followed by the final show of the festival this year, which opens at 6pm

For more information on the Milwaukee Comedy Festival, visit it online.