A tiger, a rabbi, and an orangutan walk into a bar. Oh, wait, forget it-I think I just read that novel. Oops. Never mind.
I’m so not funny. But The Imponderables are: see them at Second City before they take their sketch troupe back to Hamilton, from whence they came.
When I met Tony Lombardo, Dave Brennan and Jon Smith of the four-year-old troupe (Eric Toth rounds out the quartet), and their director Rebecca Northan for a chat, I had to know whether I was doomed to a life of wry and dry pronouncements: is it possible, I asked, to teach someone to be funny?
“No,” Smith says, immediately and categorically. “You just can’t ask someone who’s a Shakespearean actor to do standup, or vice versa. [Humour] just can’t be taught.”
“But it can be paid for!” Brennan interjects, probably seeing my disappointment. And “you can definitely teach someone to tap into their ‘funny’.”
“But it’s like painting, or skiing – there are some people [who] are just more apt to the requirements of the skill,” added Lombardo. “They see the rules, and tap into them, and can break them and go much farther.”
For all their casual banter-“we tend to hang out a lot,” notes Lombardo, and much of their material develops as they figure how to stage the amusing things that happen between them (“to get other people to laugh at it as much as we did”)-The Imponderables are remarkably attuned to the structure of good comedy.
Name-dropping Kids in the Hall, Monty Python, Carol Burnett, Jerry Seinfeld-not to mention Brecht and Kerouac-The Imponderables make it clear that they’ve done their homework. “It’s the craft of storytelling that we’ve been honing,” Lombardo says. “We can take [an] idea and give it the roller-coaster effect, so that we can build it up, and then smash it down: there you go, there’s your three minute sketch.”
“What’s nice about sketch comedy [is] that we can mix it up; there’s 17 or 20 scenes in an hour, so you can have a couple that follow a form, then have another one that’s the stupidest thing… so you can vary the pace and flow,” Tony continues.
Their current mainstage show at Second City is remarkably varied, ranging from a one-off impersonation of a raptor chick to a witty dramatization of the deleterious effects of cigarette labels on murderers’ self-esteem. Instead of political humour (“It’s not the Air Farce!”) there is a heavy, happy dose of CanCon and smartypants-ness. A narrative sketch reimagining Maurice Richards’ The Hockey Sweater featuring Celine Dion and Jann Arden manages to be simultaneously hilarious, nostalgic, and cruel, while two ambulance-impersonating men are chewed out by a roommate in another sketch that ‘breaches the fourth wall'(the invisible divide between performers and audience) to get its surprise laughs.
The effect is less of a comedic template than of highly-polished professionalism, or as Northam observes, the sense that “these guys have their shit together!” Northam was brought on board to help shape the sketches into the current remarkably fast-paced, high-energy show.
Mostly “by yelling ‘faster!'” she says, miming the cracking of a whip. The Imponderables report that the between-sketch vogueing and chair-throwing is also mostly the director’s fault.
Throwing chairs-this is funny? It is-and should definitely be seen live. “We meet a lot of people our age who’ve never been to a comedy show, never even been to Yuk Yuk’s,” says Brennan. “And it’s a real shame. If all you’ve seen of comedy is T.V. or movies, it’s a waste of the whole experience. It’s like growing up on music videos and never having been to a concert.”
“We’re just asking that you find funny something that we thought was funny. We don’t want to think that we wasted out time thinking how funny this was,” explains Smith.
“Right, cause we’ve got so much else to do,” retorts Brennan.
“No, you’re right. We could think of bad ideas all day, our lives wouldn’t change that much,” Smith admits.
“For myself,” Lombardo interjects, “There was this sense of ‘Okay, great, you’re funny around your friends, so here’s a spotlight and a stage-be funny. [And] at first there was a bit of apprehension… But as things progressed a bit, it turned into, ‘There’s a stage-hey, everybody check this out, this is funny!'”
And the guys have managed to develop their zany ideas into something worth pondering-even if, like me, you have no hope of learning any lessons in ‘funny’ anytime soon.
The Imponderables’ one-hour sketch comedy revue is at Second City (56 Blue Jays Way) March 19 and 26 at 11 pm. For tickets ($15 students), call (416) 343-0011.
