We went out to Toronto’s apparently-famous comedy club The Second City tonight to see a sketch/improv show called The Meme-Ing of Life. And what do you know? It was pretty great.
I’m a fan of sketch comedy, and have been since the days of The Fast Show and Big Train. One of my favourite shows that I’ve seen live at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in years gone by was a sketch/improv show, too — performed by Amsterdam outfit Boom Chicago. I particularly enjoyed tonight’s show because it reminded me, to a certain degree, of Boom Chicago’s shows that I’ve seen in the past — and that is most certainly a very good thing indeed.
The Meme-Ing of Life was an interesting show for a number of reasons, perhaps chiefly for what it wasn’t. The name and posters implied that this would be a show heavily inspired by Internet memes, which gave me some degree of trepidation going into it. A two-hour show in which people who think they’re funny simply regurgitate things they’ve seen on Reddit recently would be pretty cringeworthy, I’m sure we can all agree — there are certain things about Internet humour that make it best viewed in its native environment rather than bringing it into meatspace.
Fortunately, however, the cast didn’t take this route. Rather than directly referencing memes, the show consisted of a series of sketches that were loosely inspired or which made oblique references to things which had been Kind of a Big Deal on the Internet at various points in the past. For example, one sketch featured a band of cheerleaders spewing out increasingly-inappropriate sexual chants on the subject of “legitimate rape”, abortion et al, while “Coach,” an “old white man who knows what’s best for us” gets increasingly irate. This is, obviously, a reference to a number of things — the famously-heated discussions over whether or not you can make the word “rape” funny (hey! You can!) and the U.S. politician (I forget who) who made the ill-advised comments about “legitimate rape” a while back.
It wasn’t all politically-charged stuff, though, and not all of it wore its inspirations on its sleeve. Two of the best sketches in the show featured no words whatsoever — one was a wonderful mime/dance number accompanied by music in which a man and a woman did the “dance” that will be familiar to anyone who has ever ridden public transit in their life as the man attempted to get the woman to move her bag off the seat; the other was a fantastic mime scene in which two rival basketball players performed increasingly-ridiculous shots.
The overall theme of the show was “making a little difference”, and this was returned to a number of times throughout the course of the evening through a number of touching little interludes. In one, a member of the audience was “picked on” and it looked as if he was going to be the butt of a few gags, but it actually turned out the cast were just buying him a drink. In another, the same thing happened, but this time the “unfortunate” audience member was rewarded with a pre-loaded Starbucks card. And in the last, an audience member was quizzed on what she would do if she had a bit of money to spare and then rewarded with an improvised song about her desires which unfolded while a bucket was passed around the audience for everyone to sling some spare change into — once the song was over, she was just given the money.
To say too much about the show would be to spoil it significantly, but it provoked a number of genuine laughs very regularly. I’m always impressed by the quick wit of people who are good at semi-improvised sketch comedy, and this show certainly did not disappoint in that regard. In fact, just to prove that they were serious about what they do, the cast returned after the main show had ended and performed an extra, completely improvised routine based on an audience prompt word. It was something quite special to see.
