Making Art Noises was a ton of fun and laughs, and showed us that really anything can be funny if it is performed by funny people. It gets high marks from me and my only complaint: it wasn’t long enough!

PuSh Festival - Stage Review

Show: Making Art Noises 

Comedians: Ryan Beil, Charles Demers

Venue: Club PuSh (Performance Works,1218 Cartwright St, Granville Island)

Date: February 1st, 2012

Reviewed By Alex Hutt

You’d think that a mix of theory and comedy wouldn’t quite sell, but in the capable hands of Ryan Beil and Charles Demers, we buy it completely while having a good laugh in the process. This is because the comedy theory is suffused well into the stand-up so that even though we are learning about comedy, we are also laughing about the sad, and as a result, inherently amusing truths of the theory.

Beil and Demers kicked it off with comedy, dancing suggestively to Enya’s “Only Time”. “Everybody loves when we start off with a jerk-off joke.” Demers smirked. The set-up is Beil’s character tries unsuccessfully all night to get the audience to not laugh, and to prove that he is a real actor not just a comedian. Demers on the other hand, is mostly doing straight forward stand up. They then brought up a few people (from the audience or not wasn’t all that clear since some of them were really good acting wise) to complete the ensemble and went through a series of experiments, showing that almost no matter what you throw at a crowd at a comedy event they will likely laugh.

The first to illustrate this was the reading of a script from the failed Friends spin-off Joey. Taking a God awful script from a Christmas episode and having Beil and another woman act it out should have been at the most mildly chuckle inducing but it still had the crowd laughing loudly. “I don’t get it,” Beil shrugged. “It’s comedy, people are searching for the joke,” Demers counters. Which is exactly why the whole night was so clever yet so entertaining. We know that some of these skits aren’t the funniest material in the world, but it was the fact that the intent was not to make us laugh that ended up getting the opposite result. This excerpt from Joey was the best at showing that, but that doesn’t mean the rest was just as hilarious.

Beil and Demers then tried “No Laugh Improv,” improving a tragic scene in which a young man has a whole in his stomach and is going to die. Whenever any of the actors got the crowd to laugh, a bell would ring and that person would be replaced. Safe to say, there was a lot of actor switching going around, and a range of differing Japanese accents.

What followed was the monologue portion, where one of the audience members read aloud a monologue from an Anton Chekhov play. Even with the complete seriousness and drama that Chekhov employs, the personality and cheekiness of the delivery had the audience in stitches. “This guy knows what I’m talking about,” the actor cracked.

At this point, Beil and another audience member tried to perform a whole scene from A Streetcar Named Desire, while Demers and the others acted as hecklers from a bachelorette party. The highest point from this scene? “Can I get a Momma Burger?” Beil, who is known for being in the A&W commercials, broke down with a “What – What the **** did you say?”

To close the show, all members did a song and dance number about being “really really sad,” which included some impressive bass playing from one of the audience members. Consequently, he also had the “Momma Burger” line.

Making Art Noises was a ton of fun and laughs, and showed us that really anything can be funny if it is performed by funny people. It gets high marks from me and my only complaint: it wasn’t long enough!

Written by :

alessandro