UVic grads on the brink of a show-biz breakthrough
Chris Wilson is no longer a knife salesman for Victoria department stores.
And for that, the 30-year-old comic actor/writer is thankful.
Wilson is one half of Peter ’n’ Chris, an award-winning comic duo performing this week at the Metro Studio. The pair will revive Here Lies Chris, their one-hour show that debuted at the Vancouver Sketch Comedy Festival in 2014 and subsequently sold out in San Francisco and Toronto.
Wilson and his comedy partner, Peter Carlone, became fast friends while studying theatre at the University of Victoria. They’ve written and performed sketch comedy together since debuting their act at the Victoria Fringe Festival in 2008.
This week Wilson, who’s based in Toronto, recalled being hired as a young man to be a knife-selling pitchman for the Bay and Zellers in Victoria. “There’s still a fringe show, somewhere, based on that,” he said with a laugh.
Here Lies Chris is, in a nutshell, a series of comic death scenes. Peter kills Chris, then has to visit “alternate realities and universes” to try to find a new version of his partner.
“He keeps killing every version he finds,” Wilson said. “I think I die nine or 10 times. Maybe more.”
The show has roots in a Back to the Future- style romp the pair created years ago. Then Peter ’n’ Chris created a skit about a fellow who steps on a banana peel and dies.
“We kept adding to that,” Wilson said. “We thought it’d be fun to write a show where there is a series of different death scenes. We sort of melded all those ideas together.”
All six of the Peter ’n’ Chris shows they have created are based on the pair’s fictional misadventures. Wilson says their humour is influenced by everyone from Monty Python to Key & Peele, the American sketch comedy duo.
Both full-time writer/performers, Peter ’n’ Chris also write for such programs as CBC Radio’s The Irrelevant Show between their own projects. Wilson says they would eventually like to do television — they recently pitched a project to the Comedy Network.
If critical acclaim means anything, Peter ’n’ Chris certainly appear poised to make a show-biz breakthrough. Their shows, including Here Lies Chris, are routinely judged “best of the fringe” at festivals across Canada.
Their first combined comedy-writing efforts were hatched during studies at the University of Victoria. Wilson recalls writing a spoof of Richard III in which Shakespeare is advised to cut out the “dumb” parts of a too-long play.
Peter ’n’ Chris eventually decided to try to make a go of their act after a five-city tour in 2009.
“It wasn’t, like, wildly successful, but it was certainly fun. We wanted to do it then … [but] it wasn’t like, ‘Do you want to be best friends?’ ‘Yeah, sure!’ ”
The pair not only share a similar sense of humour, they both possess drive and ambition, Wilson said. This is important in the business of self-produced comedy, where duties include not only performing but more mundane tasks such as writing press kits.
“For the time being, we just want to keep going like this,” Wilson said. “I don’t have to pitch knives anymore, so that’s nice.”