Jordan Raskopoulos is deliciously absurd. Pitching himself as a man afflicted with a giant claw instead of a right arm, Jordan takes his audience on a crazy ride that’s three parts rock opera and four parts silly.
Opening the performance with a big show-tunes number about having the claw containing more silly rhyming than you could poke a stick at. Jumping through absurd segues to topics such as the evilness of Captain Birdseye for stealing the fingers of mermaids to training ants and terrorist pterodactyls, the laughs come thick and fast. Jordan often breaks into song at unexpected moments, belting out further numbers about his claw and an ode to Pluto.
The show was broken up with a couple of extremely funny video segments reworking the cartoons of his childhood. Both He-Man confronting a racist Skeletor and the Planeteers asking Ma-Ti to leave their team were great. The latter can be viewed on Jordan’s MySpace Page. There’s also a brief rapping appearance from Jordan’s “Gnocchi is Potatoes” character from The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, which was crowd pleasing but given the strength of the rest of the material was hardly necessary to bring the audience on board.
Above and beyond the big laughs coming from the core stories of the show, there’s so many little touches that make this show special. Moving on to level two, confusingly placed stings of suspenseful music, and the stop, revive, survive desk – all of it comes together to make something so delightfully absurd that you can’t help but love this little world he has created. There’s so many moments of sheer brilliance that it’s near impossible to pick out highlights, but if I must, the existential crisis of McDonald’s and the analysis of Rock Paper Scissors would feature highly.
It always seemed to me that Jordan was behind some of the strongest material on The Ronnie Johns Half Hour, and this show does nothing but strengthen that belief. It’s a shame that he’s not performing to the size of audience that his fellow 3rd Degree stable-mate Heath Franklin is pulling with his Chopper show. If you’re craving some Pythonistic absurdity, this is a show not to be missed.
The Adventures of the Man with the Dominant Claw runs Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday until April 29th. See “the comedy festival website” for bookings and further details.