SFist Reviews Kasper Hauser/Elephant Larry
It's a little intimidating stepping up into the batter's box to do any sort of Sketchfest review in light of recent SFist events. Last thing we'd want is to get nasty comments back by celebrities. So, with all that in mind, we're just going to get the negative stuff out of the way with our Kasper Hauser/Elephant Larry review first so we could spend the rest of the review manning the trenches. And that is this-- we thought the opening act, Elephant Larry was better.
Now, before tomatoes get thrown at us, we don't mean it in a negative way. It's not like we didn't enjoy Kasper Hauser-- we very much did-- it's just that we liked Elephant Larry better. We thought they had a lot more energy and their skits were more inspired. Again, we're not saying one group was better because the other group sucked, we just mean that one impressed us more.
Elephant Larry was just plain fired up. In one skit, a couple of cast members got so into it they cracked up all the other group members. Their last skit, a faux rap video about Earth Day was a perfect illustration of why we enjoyed them so much-- it was great parody of hip-hop concerts and it was also funny as hell. And the dude who performed it did some serious rocking of the mic. It was energetic, funny, and extremely clever.
Their best skit, actually, was a "shanty-off" which was basically an MC battle done shanty style. Yes, shanty style-- you know, all those rhyming fisherman songs that gets played in the background of "Pirates of the Carribean" (the ride, not the movie, although there's some shanty singing in the movies too). It was brilliant not just because it was well done, but because of how well it was thought out. They had their own shanty-style lingo ("harpoon" was the equivalent of "oh no, you didn't" and any mad shanty rhyme was met with cries of "blimey!) and the shanty rhymes, a mixture of seafaring subjects and disses, were brilliantly conceived. It was just a great bit.
Other highlights were a video of a 1-800 # for "the International Date Line" (like most of the audience, we spent the first few seconds utterly confused by the joke, then unable to stop laughing once we got it), a dance club hook up (made funnier the women character being betrayed by the tall, goatee wearing skinny guy), "Is it the Cookie Monster or is a Caveman," and the Frankenstein monster Socroplatetes. Which brings up another reason why we liked them-- gratuitous references to famous philosophers is always funny.
As for Kasper, we think the hitch in their bits was the frame story they had. The whole performance was centered on the idea of a shareholders meeting for SkyMaul, which, yes, was a clever way of promoting the book. So various CEO candidates were shown doing what they do in skits and giving little speeches to the shareholders. We're just not sure the frame story worked or could have worked a little bit better. It held some of the skits down as they tried to somehow get it to fit.
Some of the bits were normal type jokes (a couple's therapy session) and some bordered on Monty Python style absurdity (the 15th century farmer). All of this was clever and all of this was funny too but it didn't quite work for us as well as Elephant Larry. Again, we're not meaning to say anything negative about anyone but it's just how we felt.
We had two favorite Kasper bits. One of them was the motivational speaker type who gave demonstrations of his motivational speaker prowess. It was a nice little parody as they completely nailed the sad-sack quality of a lot of those types. But their best bit, and one of the best of the night, was a skit concerning four monks who have given a vow of silence and are told they have a special dispensation from the Pope to have four minutes of which to speak. We loved this skit because, like the Shanty-off skit, they had completely worked the scenario out to it's fullest. Four monks who have only four minutes to speak would probably do exactly what the monks in the skit did. We don’t want to give away any of the jokes, but let’s just say “Star Wars” played a major part of the skit.
So, again, we feel bad in having to say what we did. We liked both troupes, just one a little bit more than the other. All told, though, we had a quite enjoyable night.