1 senseless Fringe SKETCH comedy
Peter N’ Chris’ Best Bits
By Peter N’ Chris, Vancouver, Venue 23 (Princess Theatre)
Peter N’ Chris (Peter Carlone and Chris Wilson) are a Vancouver sketch duo who have played at many a Fringe here and elsewhere all over North America. They have done the Just For Laughs Festival and their sketch work has been heard on CBC radio’s The Irrelevant Show.
Their show at the Edmonton Fringe is nearly impossible to describe. You can come up with words like energetic, frenetic, break-neck, noisy, confusing – even demented and deranged without straying too far from what you get.
Funny? Well, that’s something else.
The two are not firmly anchored in any kind of logic – comic or otherwise. In fact, I threw out my notes because they didn’t make a lot of sense.
The duo start off in a barrage of rock ‘n’ roll in which they play two DJs spinning discs. As they mix, the only sound they come up with (and repeat over and over) is “Fuck You.” Luckily that is the low point of their show – which gets better. But not a lot.
Peter N’ Chris engage in free-form humour – the sort of thing that might be categorized as “let’s throw it at the wall and see what sticks.” They begin with a subject – in this case party small talk – and then explode into galaxies of “let’s see where this takes us.” Subject matter included boarder crossings, drinking too much, the ucky problems in cleaning up urine and police interrogations. In some of this they were assisted by two volunteers from the audience. The day we saw it the volunteers, who went along gamely with everything, should be permanently included in the act.
The two are excellent at mime and Carlone is particularly adept at dying. Which he does twice. The show is billed as their “best bits,” but in years of watching the duo, other than Carlone’s excellent death scenes, nothing in particular rang a bell.
The comic content ebbs and flows. The reaction of the audience on the laff-o-meter was probably a consistent chuckle but with very few belly laughs. Except for one joke involving a banana peel. And what does it say about an act when the biggest laugh in the show was generated by a pratfall that was already old when vaudeville was young?
2 out of 5
