Melbourne, Melbourne Fringe Festival 2014

Bear Attack, MFF 2014

0 Comments 26 September 2014

The litmus test for good improvised comedy is that no one has made a dick joke in the first two minutes.

In improvisation, there is no rehearsing, no script, and no plan; it’s a show that’s based off a suggestion by a random audience member.

This toughness means that there is a glut of mediocre performances. More often than not, the team labours on with a cheap innuendo for 20 minutes, occasionally beating embarrassed giggles from the audience. But the flip side that the difficulty of improvisation provides is that it sets a challenge for talented comics.

And when you get talented comics performing, it’s magic.

The Improv Conspiracy’s show, Bear Attack, fell into the latter group. They managed to be masterfully witty whilst simultaneously avoiding all the traps of tepid improvisation. It’s clear that these guys were the professionals – not a bunch of dudes who thought, “but I’m funny at parties, man.”

Bear Attack is a Chicago style improvised comedy show. This unique style focuses on building interesting characters in long form sketches. These sketches organically flow into each other, meshed together by a running theme.

Tonight’s show had the theme of “my heart is radio,” a suggestion from the neck-beard beside me. All the shows are different. This one began with a family scene, where the radio was warbling on about the Gestapo, child spies and Betty Bethoven’s new single, “boop de boop bop”.

From there, the show transitioned into sketches about sentient racoons, a post nuclear apocalypse state, and a cat-crushing landlord. The scene transitions were plentiful – they were either from verbal clues such as the mention of “grandma” which suddenly threw the scene into grandma’s house, while others were completely random, like the suggestion of a “western stand off”.

The show was a string of these loosely connected scenes, and just when you couldn’t see a resolution, we returned to the first scene, where the radio gave a plot that seamlessly linked all the separate sketches.

The show does not build to a climax, and the unifying plot was minimal. Instead, it was a loose collection of consistently funny scenes. This gave the night a permanent backdrop of laughter. The scenes were rich with excellent dialogue, heavy with surreal humour and memorable one-liners like “but I’m dancing, mother…”.

Indeed, the show had a plethora of original one-liners – “that’s a good question….do you mind if I answer with a marionette show?”

It would be impossible to rate the skill of the individual actors; these men were a seamless team. And in a group like this, there might be one wisecracking man with a slick one liner, but he’s nothing without the guy who sets up the scene. Their teamwork was the strength of the show, and stopped the night drowning in noise as quips are shouted over each other.

Overall, it was a fantastic show. The humour was bizarre, brilliant and intelligent; there wasn’t even one standard pop culture slur. The flow of constant chuckles peaked on diamond one liners, and the audience left feeling smart, sassy and so so entertained.

Click here for more information about the show and to purchase tickets. 

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