Recap Sketchfest gets surreal

Buzz Aldrin once explained to Ali G that “things are funny or comedic because they mix the real with the absurd.” Accordingly, the funniest sketches from last weekend’s Chicago Sketch Comedy Festival saw a man impersonating a vending machine, a mustachioed sexual educator slapping a dildo larger in length and girth than one's thigh, and a duo chucking pineapples and kitchen appliances into the audience. The acts that most expertly combined the real and the surreal also engaged the audience the best and kept them laughing the longest.

That laughter started immediately on Thursday night, kicking off the first of two weekends: A sign on the Theatre Building wall warned against an occupancy of more than 50, but the first act packed more than 100 people into the North Theatre. Kerpatty (Pat Dwyer and Erin Pallesen) was the first show up, shining most brightly when their lips were sealed (even though most of the sketches were dialogue-driven). That's meant to be a compliment—Dwyer began one scene with a candy bar dangling from his mouth and a bag of chips in his hand. When Pallesen tried to stuff a dollar bill into Dwyer’s hand in vain, Dwyer played a stubborn vending machine that refused to take a crumpled bill. The strongest scenes were brief, surreal, and difficult to categorize.

Later that night, “Sex” Ed Vincent (Paul Brittain) served as a counterpoint to Kerpatty: His hilarity stemmed not from seemingly random situations thrown together in a sequence of sketches, but from a meticulously developed character with material that was drawn out over an entire show. Brittain played an affable but incompetent sex educator who was extremely excited about sharing his knowledge. To prevent the contraction of STDs, he taught a bevy of frottage maneuvers. He demonstrated how by forming a T with his fingers: Perpendicular dicks promised all of the pleasure with none of the HIV.

Brittain moved on to a video, in which his exploits at a sex shop introduced the audience to dildos, various sex toys, and sexual games. One thing anyone can do to spice up his or her toy closet (and sex life) is to transform the game Connect Four into a “series of glory holes.” Two audience members soon joined him on stage for a game called “Scrabble.” Two sets of cards on a table illustrated items and orifices into which the items would be inserted, leading to a slew of aleatory jokes that would have made Tristan Tzara proud. Both players agreed, for example, that inserting an elephant tusk into a mail box would not, in fact, be sexually deviant. The entire night was a plausible high school sex education seminar, and the juxtaposition of serious issues like erectile dysfunction coupled with peculiar suggestions like the application of cocaine were sublime.

John Monastero and Stephen Simon performed an entirely silent show as Ten West, and their slapstick-fueled revelry was unstoppable: The show might have lacked explicit punchlines but never failed to pull guffaws from the audience. The sketch began with the death of John, with Stephen playing the Grim Reaper. While there were several different “sketches”, they were structured more like acts and fell under the same storyline. In this sense, Ten West felt more like an abstract silent play than a sketch comedy show. They enraptured the audience without being too aggressive, and executed their jokes perfectly comfortably.

Following Ten West, Team Submarine took stage to “I Want Candy”; Nate Fernald and Steve O’Brien bounded onto the stage while ecstatically flinging Smarties into the audience. Although this seemed like a cheap gesture reminiscent of high school pep rallies, the shtick rapidly escalated. Soon the duo threw Wonder Bread, bananas, potatoes, pineapples, trophies, kitchen appliances, TVs, and VCRs into the crowd. The atom bombs of their arsenal were a table and a bike. When Team Submarine asked for their things back, the audience returned them with reciprocal enthusiasm.The sudden jump from an odd but amusing opening to a fully-fledged hilarious bit glued the audience to Team Submarine.

In spite of some problems with the DVD player (they forgot to make a movie), the show continued with a rolling momentum. The back and forth between Nate and Steve ranged from cute (when discussing X-Files and Truth or Dare) to acerbic (when they broke up). Their performance seemed more like two-man standup than sketch comedy, but was nonetheless a great way to end the night's bill. Neil Hamburger-esque interludes from a pathetically hapless comedian (Jim Fath) punctuated the show, and Nate’s alter ego, “Nate the Taint,” provided even better at anti-humor: He began telling an endlessly regressive joke about the 69 position that, if not for the merciful end forced by Steve, would have lasted for at least another hour. The show ended the audience wanting more, or at least a hug from Nate.