Chicken pie, with zingers
It’s 3 p.m. on a Sunday so we’re all pretty relaxed, drinking beer and eating chicken pot pie.
The boys of Fratwurst (Eric Miinch, Josh Murray, Evan Arppe) are meeting the girls of She Said What (Megan MacKeigan, Emma Hunter, Carly Heffernan, Marni Van Dyk). They’re all hysterically funny. Over a Sunday linner (not sure what to call a meal at 3 to 6 p.m.) they make me laugh. They make each other laugh. They make themselves laugh.
The ladies only use each other’s last names, like in the military. The men are just a bit more shy. The sketch troupes, voluntarily sitting boy-girl-boy-girl, are friendly enough with each other. When I present the chicken pot pie baked in my big orange casserole dish, steaming from the oven, Murray serves everyone a slice (well, a scoop, as it’s pretty goopy), taking direction from Arppe, who shouts, “Ladies first” over the clamour of zingers. But the competitive nature of comedians emerges.
Murray, admitting a lack of romantic success, makes himself a target.
Heffernan starts calling him “Joshy.” At one point, Hunter calls him a loser. “People naturally give me the business,” Murray later dismisses. “I’m an easy target and I dish it out so I have to take it.”
It seems harsh. But they’re operating on a social level that I’m not, the sharp patois of comedians performing for each other, when they are trying to amuse each other instead of an audience. They speak not in jokes, but in jokes about jokes, references to joke structure. “You have a higher comedy IQ,” Murray says to Heffernan, suggesting why she didn’t like a particularly popular sketch. “I argue with these guys all the time, like, this joke’s gonna get a laugh. We don’t find it funny. But . . .” Heffernan jumps in, “The stuff that we would laugh at, if we were at a show, the general audience would not appreciate.” “I don’t laugh at comedy shows,” says Miinch. “A lot of times I’ll just sit there and be like, ‘oh, that was funny.’ ” They swap stories of fervent devotion to material that has never worked with audiences. “A bad habit that we used to have,” says Miinch, “we would crack each other up writing and rehearsing. We’d find a joke, then explore it and explore it. And then it was funny only to us and we’d perform it and no one laughed. We’re the only ones who have been on that journey.” It’s a good lesson for any type of writing. “If the people on stage are having more fun than the audience, that’s a problem,” says Hunter. “Having fun on stage can be very fun for an audience,” adds Van Dyk. “But it also can be very alienating for an audience and annoying. People have tastes. In food and music and wine. And they have tastes in comedy.” “I have a question for you guys,” asks Hunter. “Do you have a thing where, there are archetypes of yourselves that play into your sketches?” “I think so,” says Arppe. “Josh is like the silent on stage, if we need somebody to just make faces and reactions to things. And Eric is the wackier one and I get the straighter ones.” Neither group mentions sex, despite being homogenously male or female. In their stage work, both groups play male and female roles, avoiding gender-bashing material, a tiresome, divisive corner of humour.
“We’ve worked together for so long,” says Hunter, “we know that if there’s sort of an Alpha man, usually Mack gets it.” It’s odd because offstage MacKeigan comes across as less alpha than Hunter.
But comedians are strange people. They don’t communicate with each other as normals do. And I understand that there’s no such thing as normal, that every subculture or profession — doctors, cops, goths — has an idiosyncratic style and shorthand that they use with each other. But there is something dark about funny people, a professional, personal, escalating competition, to be the funniest person in the room, as if there were a finite number of laughs to be had.
It is, however, entertaining to be around people playing it as a team sport. My favourite moment, one of teamwork, happens when I’m out of the room.
About 30 minutes into every dinner party, I go to the front door to let in the photographer, leaving my recording device running.
In the 60 seconds that I’m out of the room, they collaborate on a long list of ways to mess with me — switching names, hiding, unplugging my fridge, faking a medical emergency, cleaning up (that’s my favourite) and refusing to speak — before shushing each other as they hear me coming back up the stairs, someone whispering, “Dad’s home.” mintz.corey@gmail.com, twitter.com/coreymintz