Recap Broken Lizard at Pabst Theater

Broken Lizard came Friday to the extravagant Pabst Theater, and in the words of one of the cult comedy troupe’s members, they “defiled the shit out of it.” That might be overstating it a bit, though the constant stream of jokes about jerking off, doing drugs, and weird sex certainly removed a least a little bit of the luster from the Pabst's majestic chandelier.

Kevin Heffernan, coming out as Super Troopers’ Rod Farva, got the show rolling, deadpanning, “Shut the fuck up. You people sound drunk.” Farva was then joined by two more troopers and, soon after, three unsuspecting audience members (one of whom was almost certainly The Happy Youngster) who were given field sobriety tests. The officers then departed and gave way to the first of five solo stand-up sets performed by each Broken Lizard member.

Steve Lemme, better known as “Fink” the beer-slamming orthodox Jew from Beerfest, kept his set short and centered on masturbation. From his humble beginnings of “grinding his little 2-year-old boner into the ground” to his more contemporary tale of accidentally pleasuring himself to cooing pigeons for a month, he kept the laughs, er, coming. Like Lemme, Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske's sets primarily held to one or two topics. Soter spoke of the variously disgusting and creepy sleeping patterns of his Broken Lizard counterparts, while Stolhanske described his first time in Milwaukee and cracked up the crowd with a song of lost love.

Jay Chandrasekhar stole the show by regaling the audience with details of the threesome he claimed to have had the previous night, smoking pot with Willie Nelson— who’s apparently “kind of a dick”—his ever-growing soy boobs, and his unique method for shipping drugs. Heffernan, too, captivated the crowd. Reliving the fateful day he was filmed naked and covered in powdered sugar for Super Troopers, he both educated and entertained in detailing the lasting effects of full frontal nudity. “I’m standing in a room full of people who’ve seen my cock,” he said.

Overall, the Broken Lizard's live performance was essentially a collection of anecdotes that were fortunately funny enough to overcome the misshapen structure of the show. The stand-up bits were more or less tied together by a series of between-set sketches, including a modern take on the classic “Who’s on first?” routine, an uproariously funny story about Lemme meeting Patrick Swayze, and the guys of Beerfest at an AA meeting. As defilings go, Broken Lizard at Pabst Theater was a pretty enjoyable one.