Improv/Comedy

This was about the most fun a review has been to write since some of the old Truck shakedowns.  I'm amused that it requires specific knowledge of two quite different, but equally obscure, cultural byways - it's a bit like a sketch I wrote the other day which hinged on the listener knowing about both Borges's influential literary techniques and Lennie Bennet's Lucky Ladders.  Never to be performed, I fear.

THE BOHMAN BROTHERS, Oxford Improvisers, Old Fire Station,15/1/19

There’s a doctorate to be written about the crossover between leftfield comedy and improvised music.  There are high profile fans, of course – Stewart Lee got air time for an improv duo through his Comedy Vehicle series, as well as facing the Celebrity Mastermind third degree on avant-guitar trailblazer Derek Bailey, whilst Vic Reeves snuck an Evan Parker solo onto a top 20 album (“Pack it in, Parker!”) – but there is also a partly shared outlook.  Perhaps it’s because both stand-ups and improvisers are often relegated to the sort of pub corners and dysfunctional function rooms that the lowliest of toilet venue rockers would sneer at, perhaps it’s that both art forms always make the most sense in an intimate live environment, or perhaps it’s just that in both cases the unexpected is rarely regretted or ignored, but embraced and incorporated into the show. 

The Bohman Brothers combine the absurdity of the oddest comedy with the most dadafiedimprov.  They have the classic comic double act dynamic, one uptight and starchy in his collar and tie, the other relaxed and wayward in a potting shed sweater.  It’s Morecambe and Wise, Bert and Ernie, ego and id.  An introduction in which welcoming platitudes are haltingly and exhaustingly mumbled over a recording of car crashes has the surreal mundanity of vintage Ted Chippington, a feeling bolstered by the fact that the duo make their close-miked scrapes and percussive skitters, not from catgut and drumskin, but from rubber bands, classroom geometry sets and a couple of fetching old-school toast racks. 

We’ve sat through self-conscious art music trying not to laugh before now, so it’s wonderful tonight to see guffaws invited with such deadpan hilarity, and cut-up texts - think Burroughs meets Mark E Smith meets spam emails - are delivered impeccably: after all, timing is a key concept in both music and comedy, and The Bohman Brothers’ strange, yet strangely ordinary, performance embodies both.  Coincidence, perhaps, but we are overjoyed that the final word enunciated, in a hilarious exchange of contrasting extracts from an old guide to tree frogs and a medical Mills & Boon novel is “mother-in-law”.  Fluxus?  They’ve only just met us!