Wham City Comedy tore through the Mercury Lounge in New York on the second-to-last stop of their most recent tour. The esteemed Baltimore art-freaks are the minds and bodies behind the late-night Adult Swim masterpieces, “This House has People in it,” “Unedited Footage of a Bear” and their most recent project, “The Cry of Mann,” which aired live on Adult Swim’s streaming network. The core group consists of Ben O’Brien, Alan Resnick, Cricket Arrison and Robby Rackleff. Additionally, Ruby McCollister and Lorelei Ramirez joined the line-up to help get things rolling.
The Mercury Lounge is an intimately small venue with some standing room and a few seats along the wall. What’s cool about viewing comedy in a venue like this is the level of intimacy between the crowd and the performers. Wham City shows notoriously utilize a substantial amount of audience participation, and this type of venue helps heighten the immersion of each sketch and show as a whole.
McCollister took the stage and burst into emphatic singing before weaving in and out of her material and other acapella musical numbers. Her high-energy right out of the gate brought up everyone’s blood pressure and helped the crowd understand what we were in for. She closed out by asking people when the first time they ever thought of — and really understood — what world peace was, throwing the audience into a call and response volley and finished up with some more soulful singing.
Ramirez came out with a subversive take on traditional stand-up. Her jokes played on the audience’s expectations by taking familiar or universal premises and warping the punchline in a way that made each joke uniquely hers. She talked about the nature of crowd work and how it is used in comedy. Usually, a comedian will scapegoat an audience member, say they look terrible and that person goes home feeling terrible. So, to try and connect more authentically with the audience, Ramirez proposed she could achieve that through touch. Then, she held some people by the hand, coached them through eye contact and exchanging warmth, before reminding everyone that we will never truly see through someone else’s eyes and never truly connect.
When it was finally time for the headliners to take the stage, we were greeted by the voice of O’Brien with what seemed like an automated message. It came to light in this “recording” that the length of the show is not defined anywhere in their contract and by that metric, comedy could technically be twenty hours or just one minute. We were then treated to a quick vaudevillian sketch dubbed over cardboard cutouts of the performers before the real Wham City scurried through the crowd and out the door to go see “Avengers: Infinity War.” After a few, beats the screen came alive onstage and Resnick, O’brien, Arrison and Rackleff were seen high-fiving in front of a movie screen waiting for the film to begin. Upon realizing that their act did not count as a show, they settled on actually performing for the crowd. Mostly because they had already missed too much of “Infinity War.”
One of the best aspects of Wham City’s comedy is that it is almost always unexpected. This is why I think McCollister and Ramirez were great choices as opening acts as well — their styles are also incredibly unpredictable. I can’t speak for everyone, but personally I have never found myself in front of what was going to happen next. From Rackleff’s impassioned speech about his poor taste in music to Resnick’s parody of a Southern salesman who does Foley work with the corpse of his dog, it is hard to predict where the material is headed even with an extensive knowledge of their work.
O’Brien, Arrison, Resnick and Rackleff all have a style that is unique to them as individuals, which works together to create the essence of Wham City collectively. O’brien tends to do informative presentations, like the one about being a detective that deals exclusively with cases like those found in the movie “Home Alone.” Arrison does dramatic monologues, like her parody of a Terminator-esque future where human-replica androids with artificial intelligence need to be destroyed because they are too nice. Rackleff is known for grim and meticulous speeches about things like his taste in music as the veins pop out of his head. Resnick usually does some kind of sales presentation, which in this case happened to be for his services as a foley artist who uses the corpse of his dog as the source of all of his clips.
Despite this structure, which underlines their individual performances, there is really no guessing how each sketch is going to go. Each member of the comedy collective had their own individual performance respectively — along with a group performance which opened and concluded the show.
Wham City is an art-student/comedy-fan’s wet dream. The incorporation of multimedia and the utilization and subversion of traditional tropes puts them ahead of the pack in terms of contemporary comedy. They have managed to incorporate all forms of art in service of laughs and sometimes terror. The closest thing to Wham City that exists right now is their spiritual predecessors PFFR Forever Ltd. who are responsible for the Adult Swim staples, “Xavier Renegade Angel” and “The Heartshe Holler.”
If you can’t be bothered to check out all of the exceptional video content Wham City has put together over the past several years, you are doing yourself a disservice by missing them live. It is technically too late for this tour but keep an eye out on social media for the next round of dates, which is posted on their Twitter @WhamCityComedy, Facebook and YouTube. They were even nice enough to hang around afterwards and entertain nonsense from wandering vagrants and fans.
If you consider yourself a fan of art or comedy you absolutely need to make it a point to see Wham City live before entropy brings about the eventual death of all living matter in the universe and have to spend eternity thinking, “S***. I really should have gone to that show.”
