Working Title: Politics Not Often Politic & Diplomats Thrown in the Duck Soup

This week Will Leschber talks Dark Porch Theater’s The Diplomats and tosses in a little, Clue & Duck Soup for seasoning…

Politics! How much longer do we have to hear the constant barrage of political rummaging, commentary, jokes, lampooning, diatribes and all too serious sidebars? What’s that now? At least until November? Sheeeesh! Oh wait…what’s that you say? Political complaining and satire actually will continue long after that? Sheit. Ah yes, I forgot, we live in the age of the 24 hour news cycle and 24/7 social media update. So it’ll never end. But this is nothing new. Social commentary and criticism has existed as long as we’ve had civilization to criticize. I should be used to it by now. And I guess it’s not all bad… after all the rhetoric and all the online rants, I still get a 1 a.m. chuckle when a dumb Trump Meme arrives in the news feed. Feed me meme!

It turns out strangers online actually do not care about your individual political opinions. Who knew! But, if you turn that political bent into a performance, a play or a film (maybe one that still gets play 80 odd years after it was made), well, you could be on to something there. I’m not sure what the true distinctions are between real news and fake news and comedy news and The Onion news anymore, but I will say if I can get my nightly news with a side of satire and a garnish of hilarity, I’ll take it! Political talk trickles into every aspect of our adult lives. Especially our art.

Dark Porch Theater is premiering a new play, The Diplomats, at the EXIT Theater early next month and if you are looking for a political landscape littered with jokes, this may be your jam.

The Diplomats, written and directed by Martin Schwartz, is described by Dark Porch as a play which “… showcases the ways in which politics are theatrical and laughter is political.” Sounds exactly like the best way to enjoy political bumbling!

L-R Karen Offereins, Tavis Kammet, Dan Kurtz, Ryan Hayes, Margery Fairchild, Courtney Merrell. Photo by Basil Glew-Galloway.

I had the pleasure of speaking with two fine actors featured in the show, Karen Offereins & Tavis Kammet, and wouldn’t you know, they had two excellent film suggestions to get you in the headspace of The Diplomats. Let us start with the wondrous Karen Offereins. She had this 80 plus year old classic film suggestion that remains hilarious after all these years:

I would say that that Duck Soup would be a great movie pairing with The Diplomats. The Marx Brothers type of humor and nutso situations are very much up the alley and tone of The Diplomats. Their brand of humor in general is a good fit. The farce element is a major driving force of the play, along with random acts by random characters at random times, to underline the very real and bizarre nature of diplomatic proceedings. This play is based on a true incident, and it is all at once ridiculous and frightening.

Those Marx Brothers never get old. Harpo and his evil face might be my favorite.

Rolling along to the next great suggestion; Bay Area actor and favorite middle school Theater teacher of all time, Tavis Kammet, had this to say for his film pairing suggestion:

“Clue…Fast paced, lots of crazy characters, an ending that’s up for interpretation…Clue”

Always with the brevity, Tavis. I dig it. With these two comedic gold film recommendations, you can assume The Diplomats will be a pretty raucous time. Check it out!

The Diplomats runs at the EXIT Theater Thursday, May 12, 2016 to Saturday, May 28, 2016. The Marx Brothers Duck Soup, 1933, is available to rent on all the usual platforms (Google play, itunes, Vudu, etc) and Clue, 1985, can be found to rent in the same haunts…unless it’s found by Colonel Mustard in the study with the Candlestick!! …or God forbid, Mrs. Blanche White with the flames!!

Everything Is Already Something: Farewell, Sweet Dick Joke

Allison Page, starting the new year with a note of goodbye.

Dearly Beloved,

We are gathered here today to say goodbye to some good sketches. Sketches which were not long for this world. Sketches as clean and sparkling as any others. Game-focused, precise sketches, escalating alongside the best of them, breaking their game at just the right moment. And yet, here we are. Grieving and sobbing for the sketches we have lost because they needed to be cut…for time.

Ah, time, a fickle master to whom we are all servants. There are but 60 minutes in an hour. We may try to stretch it, challenge it, flout it, but the truth remains. Tick tock, fart jokes, tick tock.

Yes, we must say goodbye even to these fart jokes. These gut busting gas passers. These guttural emissions. These children of the night. For they, yes, even they, cannot escape the wrath of the cuckoo clock. Father time has come for our fart jokes, and we must let them fly home on the wind which we have broken, to that great fart joke depository in the sky.

Heh heh, depository.

As we wave a farewell to our monologues about puberty and screwing inanimate objects, let us not forget what they’ve meant to us. We, the ragged, scratched up, bruised adults. The former horny pre-teens who longed for understanding and Jordan Catalano from My So Called Life, who longed to eat Oreos all day and both wanted to grow up and to stay young and weird. We salute you. We salute ourselves.

Here, too, we mourn the loss of physical sketches which nearly killed us. Back-bending, cheer-leading, freak-dancing, climbing, jumping, cartwheeling sketches crafted for the enjoyment of 10s and 10s of people. Human pyramids and a kid doing the worm alike have been slaughtered. No sketch is ever really safe, is it?

You never think it will be yours, your bouncy baby dick joke. You think you’re immune to the cut of someone else’s jib. You are not. Sometimes you find yourself cutting your own sketches and retreating to a corner of the bar where you can sip your bourbon in silence while cursing the goddamn kids who wrote a better dick joke than you had ever dreamed possible, wiping your dick joke off the figurative map and literal set list.

Not only do we lose our childish, gross jokes, but we must also mourn our attempts at social commentary and blistering satire. Our chance to show the opposing political party that we mean business and are, always, right, sometimes passes away into the recycling bin, or the annals of time and Google Drive, where they wither and age like old digital fruit.

Not only do we say auf wiedersehen to these sketches today, we celebrate them. And we welcome to life those sketches which will make it to the final performance. Those great few. Those strong, hearty few. We hold and coddle them until they are ready to be put forth in front of half-drunk audiences of rabid joke-gobblers. And we hold no ill will for them, the champions. We raise them up and brush the long golden locks of their mullet wigs. We support them with our laughter and know that tomorrow is another day, another joke, another birth of fanciful mirth or jocular rage.

This is not a mourning, but a celebration of life.

*fart sound*

Thank you.

Allison Page is a writer/actor/director and Co-Artistic Director of Killing My Lobster. She wrote this as a farewell to the sketches she cut this morning while preparing for KML’s performance at SF Sketchfest Jan 19th at The Eureka Theatre.

Cowan Palace: Uncovering April Fools

Ashley attempts to explore the origin of this hilarious holiday.

April Fools’ Day. It’s become the new holiday I love to hate. The day this gullible blogger falls for one too many grand Internet schemes.

Even though, aside from Halloween, one could consider it an actor’s holiday. It’s a day centered around a whole lot of lies! And aren’t we supposed to be good at that?

It’s also the perfect time for pranksters to spread rumors about some more well-known celebrities. Which will often reappear on social media outlets after a few months forcing us all to fall for it again (no one should joke about Full House possibly coming back to TV). How did you guys enjoy yesterday’s jokes? Did you fall for Britney Spears being pregnant or Keanu Reeves and his remake of Citizen Kane?

Well, in the midst of all the horsing around (holla, Year of the Horse!), my need to research overwhelmed my Facebook desires (also, I hadn’t watched the highly anticipated series finale of How I Met Your Mother yet and wanted to avoid the spoilers). So I began to explore some of the origins of this sneaky day.

And unfortunately, the Internet wasn’t a huge help. No one seems to agree where or when it began.

Many believe it’s thanks to France and their attempt to reset the calendar. Back in the 1500s, folks were undecided about when to pop that champagne (it is from France, after all) and make poor decisions at their New Year’s Eve bash. Some wanted it to be marked in January to follow the example of the Roman calendar while others believed the new year should be set by the start of a sunnier season: the spring. But as this decision wasn’t made immediately, it moved slowly through the population. And some people in rural areas continued celebrating in the beginning of April… thus becoming “April Fools” to those who scheduled their party in January.

But that story could easily be an April Fools’ joke of its own. There are other researchers who think the day came from spring festivals where pranking was just a general practice. These guys didn’t have the Internet so they had to entertain themselves in some way, right?! It’s also worth noting that April Fools’ Day falls around the time of other similar holidays, including both the festival of Hilaria and Holi. Most likely related to the words “hilarious” and “hilarity”, Hilaria also goes by the name of “Roman Laughing Day”. (Which, sounds like a BLAST.) Holi is celebrated in India as a way to acknowledge the new season; those taking part will often prank each other in good fun.

In any case, April Fools’ Day is something we continue to recognize. As news travels faster than ever, it’s become easy to prank almost any susceptible soul (so… me). And along with the havoc we Americans do with our fake pregnancy schemes, several European countries continue to celebrate it as well.

After potentially starting the tradition in the first place, those in France who get tricked are called a “Poisson d’Avril”, which if you’ve taken French in high school, you’ll know means “April Fish”. In fact, one common practice is to get a cut out of a fish and hook it to someone. Why a fish you ask? Well, that’s kind of unclear too. Perhaps it relates back to Jesus (because doesn’t it always?) who was often connected to fish or maybe it’s for those astrologers out there who know that fish relate to the zodiac sign, Pisces, which also falls in April.

In the end, whatever you believe about the potential origin of April Fools’ Day is up to you, pal. And how you celebrate it? Well, the jokester’s sky’s the limit! Any worthy pranks to share?