Existential Hee-Haw
A sketch-comedy troupe that could make Sartre giggle.

Coypright 2001/Brown Alumni Magazine

Walking into Killing My Lobster’s fall show—especially a few days before Halloween in a city that takes the holiday very, very seriously—is enough to convince any recent Narragansett Bay area–San Franscisco Bay Area transplant that she’s stumbled into a personalized haunted house. In fact, though, the eerie familiarity of the crowd is not a manifestation of the occult: it’s just a sign of the Lobsters’ popularity among Providence expats. Killing My Lobster Races the Dead is the latest production of Paul Charney and Marc Vogl, who in 1996 cofounded the hit sketch-comedy troupe and multimedia task force Killing My Lobster. The group’s shows have sold out San Francisco theaters, charming audiences with their exuberant blend of wit, absurdism, and slapstick. Original sketches are the centerpiece of productions that also offer a talented live band, musical-comedy numbers, film clips, T-shirt giveaways, and the occasional naked cast member.

This year’s Halloween show featured Mara Gerstein ’98, Daniel Lee ’95, Brian L. Perkins ’96, and Jon Wolanske ’98, along with an equally Brown-influenced behind-the-scenes team. At the October 27 performance, the show, described by the eight-person troupe as "comedic vignettes for the existentially challenged," began with a sketch starring a little girl whose talk-show-host frog, Morty, had come to an untimely end. As the girl sniffled through Morty’s last show—with the late frog himself ensconced in a tasteful black box—she received a dramatic boost from an unexpected barbershop quartet. The cast slid from weirdo cable-access show format into classic vaudeville convention without losing a beat, flashing confidence-inspiring familiarity with both of the genres they were tweaking.

Killing My Lobster loves to take language literally, and the group clearly recognizes the comedic virtues of repetition and of making a big mess. One of the quickest, strongest bits involved the job interview of a supermodel (sporting, naturellement, a daisy-studded blond ’fro and a pea coat) who turned out to be drop-dead gorgeous: her potential colleagues entered one by one, gaped in amazement, and crashed to the floor, sending papers flying.

But perhaps the best surprise of an evening with Killing My Lobster is that they avoid what many of us fear from sketch comedy: the leaden unfunniness known to drag down Saturday Night Live at 12:45. They’re even daring enough to flirt with it. At mid-show, a sketch about a shrink who jocularly pointed out to a homicidal patient that he was "a fuckin’ psycho" collapsed the audience’s hopes for a moment. Hmm, that wasn’t very funny. But then we discovered, in a modern-day Blow-Up–esque twist, that this scene had just been raw material for the real funny part. Armed with a remote control, two other cast members demonstrated that the scene could be played backward, slow-motion, and in a whole slew of languages to isolate a moment in which we learned that, well, "Jaime es muerte." In their comedic race with the dead, Killing My Lobster turned out to be two steps ahead of the living as well.

Killing My Lobster are the January featured artists on the Comedy Central Web site (www.comedycentral.com/spotlight/).


Amanda Katz works as a writer and copy editor in San Francisco.