June 12, 2006
"A day without laughter is a day wasted," said Charlie Chaplin; be assured that nobody in the sell-out audience had that concern. Three of England's premier student comedy teams, representing Durham, Cambridge, and Oxford, had laughter bouncing through the Playhouse for almost three hours.
With such a wide range of idea-makers paired with a wide range of audience tastes, any show with this many skits is bound to have hits and misses, but misses were scarce in this whirlwind tour - we were led through worlds of pun, fun, Roald Dahl-esque plot twists, musical madness, and monologue mayhem.
Cambridge was particularly playful, overflowing with props and enactments of battles between unlikely but fitting armies (like white versus coloured crayons or first versus second class post). they even found humour in funerals and unwanted pregnancies.
The list of now-famous comedians and comediennes who got their starts in these groups is impressive (John Cleese, Emma Thompson, Dudley Moore, Fry & Laurie, etc, etc.). Perhaps more interesting are the new places today's comedians are steering. Scenarios were rich, like Mozart's nagging housewife discovering his magic composition pen, or a mother mellifluously singing a lullaby of her startlingly realistic list of expectations to her son. The writing was, in some cases, nothing short of brilliant. Some lines, like "he entered her sensitively, like a bull with a respect for china" and "chocolate running down my throat like a velvet tapeworm," will linger pleasantly.
With such a wide range of idea-makers paired with a wide range of audience tastes, any show with this many skits is bound to have hits and misses, but misses were scarce in this whirlwind tour - we were led through worlds of pun, fun, Roald Dahl-esque plot twists, musical madness, and monologue mayhem.
Cambridge was particularly playful, overflowing with props and enactments of battles between unlikely but fitting armies (like white versus coloured crayons or first versus second class post). they even found humour in funerals and unwanted pregnancies.
The list of now-famous comedians and comediennes who got their starts in these groups is impressive (John Cleese, Emma Thompson, Dudley Moore, Fry & Laurie, etc, etc.). Perhaps more interesting are the new places today's comedians are steering. Scenarios were rich, like Mozart's nagging housewife discovering his magic composition pen, or a mother mellifluously singing a lullaby of her startlingly realistic list of expectations to her son. The writing was, in some cases, nothing short of brilliant. Some lines, like "he entered her sensitively, like a bull with a respect for china" and "chocolate running down my throat like a velvet tapeworm," will linger pleasantly.