Topical humor: On the big (and small) screen
This week in local comedy
Jordan Belfi and Rainn Wilson in "Missing Pieces"
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It doesn't have the allure, mystique, or patron saints/dead mascots of the local music scene, but recent years have shown that for every few singer-songwriters that pop out of the Austin soil, a comedian sprouts up as well. With eight venues (Café Caffeine, Capitol City Comedy Club, ColdTowne Theater, Esther's Follies, The Hideout Theatre, The New Movement, Salvage Vanguard Theater, The Velveeta Room) currently devoted to regular comedy programming, finding out what's happening in local funny can be a bit of a hassle. That's why we introduced Topical Humor, which covers the latest of what's happening in Austin's comedy scene.
• Girls Girls Girls' annual The Boys Of Summer run began last week, and while this marks GGG's fourth go-round with the men of Austin improv, this year it cast the net well beyond the depths where Hideout Theatre regulars swim, reeling in Westen "Shorty Stump" Borghesi of White Ghost Shivers, Salvage Vanguard Theater founder Jason Neulander, and comedic man-about-town Owen Egerton. Each will be the star of his own Broadway-style musical, which, given their backgrounds, just might involve some old-timey shufflers for Borghesi, outer space adventure for Neulander, and a movie that deserves mocking comeuppance from Egerton.
• Sinus Show co-creator Egerton still sits in to riff on a movie at John Erler's Sinus spin-off Master Pancake Theater from time to time, but there's no word yet whether he'll contribute to Master Pancake's peformance at the 2009 Out Of Bounds Comedy Festival. The group will be one of 74 sketch and improv groups and nine stand-up acts (there's a discrepancy here) appearing as part of Austin's only week-long celebration of all things funny, along with Impro Melbourne (as in Australia), Scram (starring past Decider interviewees Joe Bill and Jill Bernard), '80s-obsessed L.A. sketch troupe Summer Of Tears (which also has a Decider interview available for your perusing), Chicago's Cook County Social Club, and a double shot of last year's most talked-about OOB acts, gonzo sketch warriors/torture enthusiasts Fuct. Festival founder Jeremy Lamb has confirmed that the week's film component, the Double Eagle Film Festival, will feature a screening of Jonathan Goorvich's Missing Pieces, which co-stars Rainn Wilson as the porn- and nicotine-addicted best friend of a guy who's so fearful of testicular cancer that he goes to Tijuana to be castrated. (You know, just like that one episode of The Office.)
• The members of Snackers look to feature-length films to inspire their August shows at The Hideout—those of John Hughes, Savage Steve Holland, and any other director who peaked in the '80s and used The Brat Pack to cram a decade's worth of high-schoolers into one of eight distinct personality types. Like those films, The Snackers Club (which takes up residency in next month's Thursday Threefer) finds five actors way past their high school days pretending like they still engage in clique warfare and pranks on the principal; unlike those films, it won't be presided over by an older guy with a goofy haircut who sits on a mountain of money instead of a director's chair.
• The Emmy-nominated Latino Comedy Project has never shied from pushing buttons, but those buttons aren't usually on a television remote control. Not so with El Channel, the troupe's new sketch show debuting August 21 at Center Stage. Sounding like an ethnically and politically charged SCTV, the show takes a behind-the-scenes look at "the most legendarily disaster prone television station on the airwaves," while also providing a peek into the programming that funds those disasters. If that Emmy nomination pans out, it could mean more than work for the LCP—it might be a chance to do some research for future iterations of El Channel.
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