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by Roger Bainbridge, Kyle Dooley, Brandon Hackett, Becky Johnson, Lindsay Mullan and Ann Pornel, directed by Carly Heffernan

The Second City, Toronto

August 30, 2016-February 4, 2017

Host of You Ought to Know!: “The only thing standing between you and knowledge – is you!”

With its new revue Come What Mayhem! The Second City returns to the edgy, incisive comedy that made How to Kill a Comedian such a thrill last year.  The comedy troupe does not take the easy escapist route of pretending that the wide range of troubling events of the past six months did not happen.  Instead, it daringly faces them head on and in so doing raises their game and creates comic sketches that often require complex responses.  In the midst of a world of uncertainty, the troupe’s pushing the boundaries of what subjects are suitable for comedy is not only exciting but necessary.

Your first glimpse of what the show’s attitude will be come when you enter the theatre and notice the deliberately aggressive set that Camellia Koo has designed.  It looks like the backside of a concrete building covered in graffiti.  Recognizable are a “Black Lives Matter” logo, the word “accessible” and the word “consent”.  All this suggests that the show with deal directly with contentious subject matter.  The slanted walkway high up on the wall (never used) looks dangerous and hints that it is not the only thing in the world that is askew. 

The show does not begin with aggression but lures us in with a general sketch about relationships untied to current affairs.  A woman (Lindsay Mullan) comes from a clinic and announces her pregnancy test result to her boyfriend (Roger Bainbridge).  His reaction to the negative result is so over-the-top that she wonders if he’d would still love her if the result were positive.  So she says she lied.  By the end of the sketch we don’t really know what the result was because

the truth has been undermined so many times.  Thus the sketch despite its general nature perfectly sets up the show about a world where truths have become hard to determine. 

The sketches that follow fall into roughly three groups – those that deal explicitly with current event, those that deal with general topics that have been in the news and those that are unrelated current events.  The most daring sketch in the entire show belongs to this first group and occurs after intermission.  A black man (Brandon Hackett) reading the news about the shooting deaths of black men in the US by police becomes increasing distressed.  Meanwhile, his white wife (Lindsay Mullan), seemingly oblivious to his state of mind is thinking only that it is their “Date Night”, the night of the week they set aside for sex.  Each time he mentions a news item, she tries, in vain, to change it into a sexual enticement. 

We can see how a sketch with the same structure would work if the man were engrossed in, say, a fishing magazine.  But here, the white female’s insensitivity to her black husband’s distress borders on funny-as-creepy rather than funny-as-humorous.  Yet, the satire at a deeper level is trenchant since it shows how white people may simply want to get on with normal activities and don’t understand why black people in light of such news don’t think they can.  The sketch is one of the best explanations on stage of the Black Lives Matter movement.  Fortunately, the husband never does give in to his wife’s advances.           

Even a more obviously comic sketch in the first group has a very dark undertone.  In this sketch, the last before intermission, we are presented with a game show called “You Ought to Know!” with a typically over-enthusiastic TV host (Roger

Bainbridge).  Two contestants (Kyle Dooley and Becky Johnson) are from the troupe but one is chosen from the audience.  The contest is to see who can most often identify correctly the name of a person, group, place or event in recent news in answer to the host’s question.  In the first few rounds the host asks for names that anyone who follows the news really should know.  Unsurprisingly, the two troupe members get every answer wrong.  More surprisingly, so does the audience member until the host asks him the question (which clearly will change over time), “Which celebrity couple has announced they are getting a divorce?”  This the audience member knows, but he is chided for it anyway because, unlike all the previous names, this is emphatically not something that “You Ought to Know!”  In this funny but scary way the sketch asks why we fill out heads with useless information about pop culture rather than with information about the forces that really are shaping the world we live in.                          

Sketches about general issues raised recently also are presented to make you think as well as laugh, or, more disturbingly, to wonder whether you should laugh.  In an early sketch two friends (Johnson and Mullan) apologize for accidentally calling their mutual friend (Ann Pornel) “fat”.  Pornel, who is plus-sized and quite a live wire, says she is fat and that her friends should be allowed to speak the truth.  This encourages the two to outdo each other in calling her fat, until one of them reaches the limit.  The sketch makes explicit the parallel between “fat” in the sketch and the n-word, so that we see the seemingly frivolous skit is really about who can use what terms about whom.

In another, a teen (Dooley) comes out with a stack of cue cards, like those used in music videos (see INXS’s “Mediate”), to make a statement about being bullied.  The problem is that he has been bullied by someone messing with his cards.  As he earnestly underlines points in his speech about bullying, tampered cards appear ridiculing the speaker.  It’s funny but as with many other skits in the show, it also makes us question our laughter.  If we laugh at how Dooley is being bullied by means of the altered cards we are thus colluding with the bully.    

A third clever sketch about an important topic begins in a completely innocent fashion.  A girl (Pornel) in elementary school runs into the classroom to complain to her teacher (Johnson) that a boy pushed her down.  Rather than offering sympathy as we would expect, the teacher asks if there were any witnesses because if there were not the case is simply the girl’s word against the boy’s.  Further, the teacher says that by calling the boy a bad name, didn’t she in fact provoke the boy to push her down?  And, doesn’t she have other bruises?  Were they all made by boys pushing her down?  As with the “fat” skit we soon see the parallel between how the teacher is questioning the little girl and how the reliability of women who allege rape (as in the recent case of a CBC interviewer) can be demolished by questioning their character and trustworthiness.

In the final and perhaps darkest sketch of the show, two young people discover an abandoned gym bag outside the inside a cineplex at Square One, Mississauga.  When the two worry that there might be a bomb inside, a strange man (Bainbridge) asks why terrorists would want to blow up Mississauga (big laughs).  Then, however, he he mentions that Canada is considered a “crusader country” for its help in the Middle east and speculates on what places and events in Canada would be good sites for terrorist attacks (no laughs).  “Did I make you worry?” he asks the two on stage and the audience, “Good”. 

And that sums up Second City’s provocative approach in this show.  There are non-political skits.  A man (Bainbridge) seems to enjoy seeing all his various exes more than he does his present girlfriend (Johnson).  A girl (Pornel) competes rather unfairly with a guy (Bainbridge) in a strip-tease contest.  But these, normally standards at Second City, are outnumbered by far edgier material.  Director Carly Heffernan may let us relax a few minutes with the non-topical routines, but then she revs up the show with slew of 30-second zinger skits about a whole range of topics from Pokémon Go to insulting beggars to buying assault rifles.  In one of the best, a would-be politically correct white Canadian woman (Mullan) wonders what specifically she should call a young Asian-looking woman (Pornel).  As the white woman goes through a list of adjectives from every Asian country she can think of, Pornel finally tells her “Canadian” is the correct word.                   

That’s the type of boldness Come What Mayhem! has and it’s a breath of much-needed fresh air.  Given the uncertainty in the world made worse by the rancour and fear attached to the upcoming U.S. election the attitude seems to be that we have to prepare ourselves in whatever way we can for whatever mayhem may come.  The invigorated Second City troupe, all in top form, prepares us through comedy, even while aware that satire can barely keep up with bizarreness and danger of the real world.  It’s a brave show and one of Second City’s best.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Second City Mainstage cast: Roger Bainbridge, Kyle Dooley, Lindsay Mullan, Ann Pornel, Brandon Hackett and Becky Johnson; Brandon Hackett; Roger Bainbridge; Lindsay Mullan, Ann Pornel and Becky Johnson. ©2016 Racheal McCaig.

For tickets, visit www.secondcity.com/shows/toronto/venue/toronto-mainstage.