You can thank the January blues for Festival of New Formats. Now in its third year, the festival was created by Comedy Bar’s Gary Rideout Jr. to help people get out of their self-imposed winter cocoons with the promise of free (yes, free!) comedy, while also offering local comedians the opportunity to try out new and (hopefully) funny concepts that haven’t been attempted before.
The weeklong festival, which kicked off Monday, is basically a comedy free-for-all. A variety of stand-up comics, improvisers and sketch comedians get up on Comedy Bar’s black box stage and throw out a bunch of random, sometimes raunchy, sometimes ridiculous ideas. Then they see which, if any, stick.
I compare it to what I imagine Saturday Night Live’s writers’ room to be like: just a bunch of funny people (some more funny than others) spewing out sketches, some of which probably sounded a lot funnier at 5 a.m. under the influence, and some of which have the potential to be something really cool. (One of those “cool” acts to come out of the festival is Rap Battlez, a rap and comedy spectacle, and now a regularly sold-out monthly performance at the Bar.)
I attended the festival on opening night and watched the first three acts (there’s an act every hour from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.) to mixed results. Pitchcast, which started the night off, made a literal example of my writers’ room analogy. A group of comedians (who could have also been writers) huddled around a table, with each one improvising a movie pitch. The pitches were naturally absurd, and sometimes funny (Joan Cusack falls in love with a whale in Nova Scotia! Vin Diesel heads up a team of bald crime fighters who investigate stolen candy at an elementary school!) Though the concept was interesting and garnered enough credible guffaws from the audience, the physical concept of the performance was too static for me. I would have preferred the pitches to be actually improvised by the performers rather than just watching a group of people talk.
Next up at 9 p.m. was the improvised act Conference, which was described as “The Office meets TED talks.” It was my favourite act of the night, mostly because the performers, a group of experienced improvisers, were game for everything, and the idea of a medical conference for Pfizer and Cialis employees at a Florida resort was pretty priceless. However, I’m not sure if the format itself has longevity.
The last act I caught was Swap Meet, where two stand-up comedians presented their own original material and then “swapped” identities with each other. It had the potential to be something quite special, but unfortunately the comics themselves weren’t very memorable. Or, perhaps they were memorable, but just not for the right reasons. (Just as an aside: can female comics please stop playing dumb, or stop running their mouth off like they are Samantha from Sex and the City? Dumb and dirty doesn’t always equal funny.)
Around comedy circuits, there’s a popular adage: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.” Regardless of the hits and misses, these comedians, who keep churning out new material to either chuckles or crickets, should still be applauded. So get out of your warm house and support them!
The Festival of New Formats, Comedy Bar, 945 Bloor St. W. Runs from Jan. 2-8.