COMEDY SKETCH: Marv n’ Berry Makes Something Icy in Edmonton
Following the regionally viral video Keeping Up With the Albertans in which the province’s cities are personified as a dysfunctional family – Edmonton is the underachieving dad; Calgary the high-maintenance mom; their conflicted son Red Deer caught in the middle; mom’s hippie boyfriend Banff camped in a tent across the street; plus the unemployed houseguest Uncle (Fort) Mac – the Marv n’ Berry sketch comedy troupe has come up with something even more narrowly focused.
It’s a little film called Hard Water, dealing with an activity familiar to Edmontonians, like it or not – running and sliding along the ice on the sidewalk and trying not to fall on your ass. Of course the City wants you to clear your walks to the stone, but then it snows and melts and freezes and snows and rains and freezes and melts and rains and then freezes again – sometimes in the space of a single day. The result: Edmonton boasts some of the slipperiest sidewalks in the world. Also, potholes.
With the help of CBC Comedy, Marv n’ Berry filmed the bit on a particularly sunny slick day in March 2019, says director and cast member Mike Robertson.
“One of our members, Quinn (Contini), he’s an outdoorsy kind of guy, and he was inspired by watching snowboard videos, extreme sports, people who do really cool physical things. They all try and sound really deep, like it’s some mystical experience, but don’t make sense to anybody but themselves. We wanted to do the same thing for sliding on icy sidewalks.”
CBC Comedy wanted the troupe to do something local – so they did.
Robertson says, “We asked ourselves: What makes Edmonton unique as a city? The ice that we have here, especially when we shot on that hill going down the river valley – completely icy. You couldn’t even stand on it without going down. I thought that was pretty cool for this city, and we loved the opportunity to make something like that. I don’t think we could’ve done it anywhere else. It’s about people finding a way to make use of the winter.”
It wouldn’t be easy to replicate the Hard Water sketch on a live stage, where Marv N’ Berry will be every Saturday in March: 7:30 pm in the Citadel’s Zeidler Hall – but they have lots of material. The show will be a “Half & Half” mix of sketch comedy and improv – and you can at least expect the Albertans will show up.
