Ben and Richard McKenzie are both veterans of the Comedy Festival in particular and the Melbourne comedy scene in general. This year they decided to team up for the Dungeons & Dragons themed show +1 Sword, along with the late-night companion show Dungeon Crawl. Daniel Nicholls caught up with them both to discuss the difference between the shows.
Tell me about your new show +1 Sword.
Richard McKenzie: I had the original idea with Dave Bloustein about six years ago to do a show about Dungeons & Dragons, but initially it was going to be more of an impro show. You would walk in and there’d be a character sheet on your seat with descriptions of like, what a fighter was and clerics and wizards, and then you’d have three performers, one for each of those, and then a fourth person who would be, like, a plumber who really wanted to be an adventurer and was just like tagging along. And we wanted it to be very much an impro show, sort of like what the end of the +1 Sword show is now, where the audience will call out what they want the characters to do. That was the original idea for the show but it sort of went by the wayside until I was playing D&D with Ben last year and I just said: “I really wanna do +1 Sword.” and we both said: “Yeah, cool, let’s do that!”
But the show is now quite different from that original idea.
RM: Yeah, well, we scaled it back from the impro show to more of a ’’how-to” show.
Ben McKenzie: I actually quite liked the term the Groggy Squirrel review used, it said we were a ‘comic masterclass’ in D&D. I really wish I’d thought of that. So that’s what it has become, it’s this two-handed thing where we just love this game, we love role-playing, that idea of a communal storytelling, playing characters.
It’s very close to impro, in a way.
BM: Yeah, right. So we talk about what it means to play that sort of game, Dungeons & Dragons in particular and why it’s so awesome. And there’s a sort of tension in the show, that I’m very serious and I’m all about ‘this is how it works’ and Richard is all like: “I just wanna kill things!”
RM: I just wanna stab stuff and get awesome swords. I want to be a superhero.
BM: Yeah.
RM: And we try to demystify it as well, if people have never played before it’s sort of a difficult thing to get your head around. You need to be shown rather than told, because it’s all about how you interact. It’s this radio-play-esque thing where you’ve got to create your own world around you.
BM: I already have this reputation of sort of looking at geeky stuff in my comedy, so for me it’s important not to water it down. I’m not trying to be cool about it. I find it very disappointing when I go to see a comedy show that is billed as being about something but then when you go it’s got like three jokes about that thing and then the rest is: “How different are men and women?!” and that’s not what I went to the show for. It’s important to me that we make no apologies for D&D. We think it’s awesome. We make fun of the funny things inside it, but we never make fun of it as a whole. So if you don’t know anything about the game you’ll be introduced and you’ll learn about it, and if you do know you’ll love it because you’ll have that same love for it that we do.
So if that’s +1 Sword, what is Dungeon Crawl?
RM: Well that’s more like the original idea. It’s basically an hour of role-playing comics, playing a very simple version of the game. Ben plays the Dungeon Master and I’ll play all the monsters, and halfway through the party will sit around the fire and sort of chat to each other about cool adventures they’d had in the past, so you find out a little bit about these comics that you know and how they played D&D. As nerdy as it is, everyone who’s ever played has a great story that they love to tell, and people love to hear about them. So it’s not so much an explanation of what D&D is, it’s actually seeing it in action. It’s gonna be: “You’re in an inn! There’s a wizard in the corner! What do you do?” and see what happens.
BM: And some of the comics we’ve asked to do it have been very excited about it. I asked Jordan Raskopoulus (from Axis of Awesome) if he wanted to do it and he immediately wrote back: “Does a Mind Flayer have tentacles? I wanna do all three!” so he is very keen. And we are getting comics who do love the game, they don’t have to be hardcore, but we don’t want anyone coming in and saying: “This is stupid, why are we in a dungeon?”
RM: Everyone has their own style of playing. There’s no wrong thing to do when you’re playing. That’s why it’s so great.
BM: I am trying to get as many female comics as possible. There’s such a preconception of D&D being a boy’s thing, and there is some truth to that stereotype, but I really want to push back against it, because there are no constraints to the game that aren’t just people’s prejudices. We see that with the show, people show up who just seem like complete opposites in every way, but role-playing is the thing they have in common.
Richard you also have another show in the festival, Robot vs. World. What is that about?
RM: It is: Optimus Prime! A Dalek! and Astroboy! On stage mucking around for an hour. Our classic 80’s Optimus Prime is eight feet tall, played by Adam McKenzie. I play the Dalek, Tegan Higginbotham is Astroboy, Kate O’Neill plays all the human characters and Lana Schwartz is our puppeteer. It’s basically what happens when these superheroes who just owned the 80s get superseded by these ridiculously shit card-based cartoons like Yu-Gi-Oh. So they decide to open up this detective agency but they’re not very good at it because they don’t get along very well. But they’re all they’ve got, so they stick together. It is freakin’ awesome! I’ve got the best job as the world as the Dalek, I just kind of sit there shouting. And I’ve got a drinks holder in there, so I can have a beer!
+1 Sword runs until April 17th at Caz Reitops Dirty Secrets. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website
Dungeon Crawl runs every Wednesday of the festival to April 14th at Gertrude’s Brown Couch. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website
Robot vs. World runs until April 17th at Gertrude’s Brown Couch. For full booking details go to the Melbourne Comedy Festival website