Comedy Performance Special Guest
Mon Frère Comedy ~First Time Guest~
The story of Mon Frere Comedy Troupe is the story of a man, another man, and four more men. It’s a real sausage festival. We started cooking it up on the mean streets of Greensboro, North Carolina at the Idiot Box Comedy Club two years ago with our spicy brand of sketch comedy and cutting edge slide-show-on-a-wrinkled-bed-sheet technology . Back then, the Idiot Box was mainly improv comedy and stand-up, but now, a few people have seen the posters we tape to the window. They’re good posters. We perform at the Idiot Box every third Friday of the month with an ever-increasing smorgasbord of original and hilarious material. Abroad, we’ve performed at the Geek-Week festival in Boston, and the North Carolina Comedy Arts festival in Chapel Hill. That’s where we met our fellow Carolina sketch troupe Robot Johnson, who invited us to open for them a couple of times in Charlotte, first at the Carolina Actors Studio Theatre and again when they moved to their new regular gig at The Mill.
Our goal in Mon Frere has always been to use comedy to make sense of the world around us. We’re essentially nerdy guys, which means we’re a little too interested in things. We enjoy life and human culture to the point that we separate from it, unable to fully mesh with the world we love because our analytical obsession forces us to first determine why we love it—indubitably in the insecure hope that we could recapture it or make it last forever. Comedy is better than drama for this sort of misguided quest, because the goal is impossible to achieve. Better to laugh about it than to cry.
When we went to write our “Harry Potter” show, we proceeded with business as usual, conjuring individual sketches inspired by what-if scenarios and the absurd peccadillos of everyday existence. However, as we wrote sketch after sketch featuring “random student number one” or “ generic child number two,” a creative complication emerged. The most enchanting part of J.K. Rowling’s, or any great fantasy author’s setting is how immersive it is. The reader feels like the world has been fleshed out—to the point that they could walk anywhere or meet anyone in Hogwarts, even to the parts undescribed, and find them as deep and vibrant as anything set down in the published text. Every character--no matter how small--has a name, a history, hopes and opinions. Every stone has a story. If we were to properly explore this work, we had to get to the real magic that makes it work—only then could we truly mess it up. We took our bit-part players and brought them to the forefront: our two ever-present nameless students received names, motivations, and relationships that were all their own. And since they were in every sketch, this fleshing-out knitted our naturally frenetic sketch show together in surprising ways. Bound with character flesh, a narrative crept up from the basement of the backwoods cabin of our minds. We called it Huffle Puffed because the Necronomicon was already taken. Rowling’s classic characters were still there, but now they had competition for the spotlight. A few of them grew very angry about this. What we had started to craft was a meta-aware theatrical rumination akin to Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a visceral bildungsroman in the vein of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. What we got when we finished was another Harry Potter fan-fic with a bunch of R-rated jokes.
