A Completely Impartial Review of "The Very Best of BLACKOUT!!!" at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre

Erica and I went out to the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre this evening for a show called, as you could probably guess from the title of this entry, "The Very Best of BLACKOUT!!!" Neither of us had ever seen "BLACKOUT!!!" before, if such a thing exists, so we have no way of telling whether what we saw really was the very best of "BLACKOUT!!!" or if the title of the show was just a clever marketing ploy to get naive us into the theatre. Didn't matter — neither of us had ever been to UCB before, we both wanted to check it out, I needed to catch a train home before the evening was out, and this was the earliest show. They could've called it "The Very Worst of BLACKOUT!!!" and we would've gone, thinking the title was some sort of subversive avant-garde improv thing.

The show was only five bucks anyway, so it wasn't a big deal whatever they called it.

BLACKOUT!!! is this sketch comedy troupe whose sketches are all under a minute long, so you get like fifty or so in an hour, not counting the set-up time between sketches. It was, uh... rushed, I guess would be the right word. Every now and then, I chuckled, but more often than not, I thought they'd be funny if they just tried a little harder. Like their timing was off, or they skimped on the set-up, or they stopped with a punch-line that anticipated another, funnier punch-line following it. I can't say it was easy getting used to the rythym, either, or jumping randomly between topics.

So it may seem odd that I'm gonna give TVBoB!!! the best commendation I can possibly think of: if I had nothing else to do and someone else to do it with, I'd go back. I mean, it's fifty percent the cost of a movie and maybe like fifty-five percent the entertainment value, so I guess it's a pretty decent deal.