With their forced repartee and often cheesy entertainment, tonight shows are a rich source of material for satire.
“The 2Nite Show Live”, which is being staged for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) by a group of young comedians (Grim, Stuart Daulman and Rohan Johnson) who won the 2006 Campus Comedy Competition, partly succeeds in parodying the medium.
Highlights included the pointless conversations between the leader of the band and the host similar to those which appear on “The Late Show with David Letterman”, and a segment in which the “program” goes to the home of an ordinary viewer so his girlfriend can be given a gift of socks.
While boys in dresses are about as funny as something that’s not (get some girls involved in the group), kudos should be given to the comic who played the cuckolded boyfriend with an amusing geekiness.
Also impressive were some of the ad breaks that appeared on a screen, especially the take off of those pretentious Calvin Klein perfume advertisements and the promotion for a Mel Gibson movie called “The Passion of the Mice”.
Although a couple of the other commercials failed to hit the mark, the ones that did had more than a hint of The Chaser about them.
Some stand-up and a half-naked bloke kicking a ball around seemed out of place, but the guys who respectively played the host and the warm-up did a good job of keeping the production running smoothly and with a decent amount of laughs.
Rohan Johnson’s ridiculous rap singer with health department spectacles was definitely worth a look.
The team responsible for “The 2Nite Show Live” will undoubtedly benefit from having their material viewed by people who aren’t necessarily their mates so that next time they’ll be more judicious about what to leave in and what to edit out.
“The 2Nite Show Live” is playing at MICF until the 21st of April. For booking details, go to the MICF website