Leaving thousands of cards around town bearing a slightly cryptic message in the hope of a response is an intriguing social experiment. Hoping to transform the results into a humorous Fringe show, it becomes a risky gimmick. Undertaking this perilous task was Tommy Little with his show Call Me.
The concept of the show was covered during a faux interview as part of the opening filmed sequence, however the full reasoning behind the cards was never really explained. A bit more back story may have given the show a bit more relevance and substance. It may have been touched upon but due to the poor audio quality, a problem that plagued the majority of the show, I missed it. What was it that they say about working with children, animals and technology?
As illustrated with some vox pops filmed by Tommy and his crew, there was a major flaw with the cards themselves. With the first line on the card reading “Tell me something funny, tell me a joke”, Tommy was obviously expecting a goldmine of hilarious material, but that was not to be. The quantity and quality of the calls indicated that most people found the cards disturbing or needy rather than inviting. With thousands of the cards in circulation and a Fringe show deadline looming, Tommy had to press on regardless.
Tommy was able to work the phone messages into a coherent show structure by poking gentle fun at the content and using them as launching points and segues for some great stand up routines. With a personable stage presence he treated us to some amusing stories that, while not always relating to the task at hand, gave us some background to his personality and we could easily warm to him. Even though some of this material could easily had been simply crowbarred in just for the sake of inclusion, deeper evaluation revealed a link to the messages, particularly the more abusive calls, which provided some amusing analysis of society. The flow of the performance did suffer somewhat with Tommy doing his own teching from the stage but he did his best to minimise the clunkiness.
There were some flashes of brilliance in his performance but they were often let down by the technology upon which the show was heavily based. The phone messages were generally a garbled mess that required extensive translation, but he was able to interact with one of the clearer messages in an interesting and hilarious manner. An example of another found card was the source of some fantastic hilarity, but the fuzzy image of it on the screen had us too busy squinting to adequately listen to the comedy gold that Tommy was weaving. A greater success was a call by a distressed woman that was turned into a clever closing sequence. It broke down the fourth wall and used a couple of filmed segments to provide the laughs.
There have been a number of brilliant social experimentation comedy shows in recent years however this one fell short of the mark. It illustrated that in order to pull it off, getting interesting results certainly helps. Tommy managed to do a commendable job in getting an entertaining show out of the little that he had.
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