What a GONG SHOW!

In the late 1970s there was an amateur talent contest televised on NBC’s daytime schedule called The Gong Show, from which the contemporary Gong the Show has borrowed some of its particularly hilarious characteristics. In the televised edition amateur performers of, as Wikipedia states, often “dubious” talent competed in front of a panel of three celebrity judges for a winning prize of $516.32. If the act was particularly heinous the judges had the option of stopping them dead in their tracks by striking a large gong. The stage version, which plays at Comedy Bar the second last Friday of every month, has a similar structure. It is hosted by Brendan Halloran and, like in the television program, there are three judges of some renown; at the show I attended there was a regular punk teen, Jimmy Buffet, and a wealthy businessman who had retired to Jamaica (played by Scott Yamamura, Andy Hull and Glenn Macaulay respectively). A slew of comedy acts vie to be the strongest, or the funniest, or the most interesting, or, at the very least, the comedians that are kept onstage without being gonged for the longest length of time. There are usually three rounds of Gong the Show, but for the special Sketchfest Edition that I saw, there were only two. However, in the second and third rounds the comedy acts that have the highest time scores return and improvise a different routine or set battling each other again until, ultimately in round three, one winner remains. Jon Blair of The Sketchersons was the reining Gong the Show undefeated champion from May, 2010 to November, 2010.

I think that most of the time audiences attend comedy in Toronto because they appreciate how solid the sets coming from Canada’s most successful, beloved and acclaimed comedians can be. Sketches have been carefully honed, stand up routines have been slowly perfected until they run like well oiled laughter machines, and our city’s improvisers have reached a level of imagination and instinct so sharp that even that which is made up on the spot has an element of polish and refinement to it. Yet, sometimes I think we all crave a little chaos, and that is exactly what Gong the Show provides. Here we are given the opportunity to see some of Toronto’s best comedians scramble, to pull inspiration out of their hats, or not, and the result is that, while the evening is a different kind of funny than one is often treated to at Comedy Bar, it has the potential to be just as entertaining.

What I found most interesting about Gong the Show was that it’s obvious that the performers have realized that it is not necessarily a well rehearsed sketch that ensures victory within this show’s parameters. Therefore the show mostly becomes an array of different ploys, many clever, some desperate, some feeble, to employ trickery and cunning comedic perspicacity to entice the audience into being either immediately captivated (or immediately distracted) and wanting to see this particular something unfold, and thus keeping the gong at bay.

Let me give you a few examples. Jon Blair and Sarah Hillier came onstage, Hillier dressed up as Uncle Sam with giant red boxing gloves while Blair was clad in a leopard print dress, a long red wig, and read a soliloquy from Hamlet. Apart from being a wide array of strong choices that an audience might be interested in seeing finding some semblance of cohesion as a sketch progressed, Hillier also promised that she would punch Blair in the crotch upfront, which gave the audience something to look forward to, and likely postponed the gong. LadyStache, Allison Hogg and Stephanie Tolev, were the winners of the evening (they performed for a whopping thirty-one seconds before being gonged), chose to push their comedy into the explicit, the sexual, and, some may argue, vulgar, adorning their matching moustaches with, first plastic breasts, and then (in the second round) a phallus, which they plied with whipped cream, which was licked off, with equal parts seduction and perversion, by two puppets who looked like they had wandered off the set of Sesame Street, a mailman and whore Prairie Dawn.

It’s interesting however, that it could be argued that the strength of the repulsion factor can be pushed too far for the audience, as the troopers from Haircut exemplified when Patrick Smith ate some Chef Boyardee, while Allie Price squirted copious amounts of mustard into her mouth, and then Smith spit his mouthful of food, Mama Bird style, into Price’s mouth, which she then swallowed and washed down with more mustard. Despite the fact that I think they made the boldest choice of the evening, they were still gonged; perhaps because the audience was gagging.

Gary Rideout Jr. and Pat Thornton came out in camouflage with plastic guns and cowboy hats adorned with worry dolls and were actually given a second chance after being gonged because someone pointed out that they hadn’t made any mention of the most interesting aspect of their getup- the dolls. Yet, when Rideout’s ode to Haitian children failed to provide immediate gratification, they were gonged again. Stacey McGunnigle and Mark Andrada, as the New Classy Affair, played with this idea of anticipation, by taking an extreme opposite strategy than everyone else, and beginning slowly and silently, forcing the audience to wait for a point, which never actually came. Carly Heffernan of She Said What took the opposite approach by bursting out and immediately conducting a beer chugging contest between her and an audience member and then attempting to start a magic show, while Norm Sousa and Cole Osborne of Punch Drysdale essentially cheated by bringing out an adorable puppy, knowing that the audience wouldn’t want to gong something so cute, sleepy and sweet. Mark Andrada helped by playing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” by Randy Newman to complete the Disneyification of the moment.

It’s obvious that the show each month will be wildly different, and I would assume that as this format progresses and evolves, that its participants will discover new strategies to ward off the gong, and that they will improve upon the ones they have already implemented. It’s essentially a gong show, but the complete wild abandon of it, the element of palpable danger in the knowledge that ANYTHING could happen (seriously), and the mixture of talent and wits and lunacy makes it another worthwhile night of frivolity at the Comedy Bar.