50 Minutes Plus Jokes has a rough opening night, and performers Cohen Holloway and Sophia Johnson have an uphill battle to win us over.  Gale force winds force a late plane arrival, meaning the show starts quite late.  They’re on the back foot – through no fault of their own – and working hard to make up for it. 

But their show is unshaped and under-rehearsed in a way that can’t be explained away by travel delays. 

As a viewer, I’m not sure where to hang my hat.  Johnson and Holloway have a great chemistry together and are clearly comfortable with each other.  I get the feeling that meeting the two of them at a party would be the highlight of the night.  

And they lean on this chemistry in their sketches.  There is a lot of status play between them.  But a lack of clarity in their relationship means I’m not sure who is doing what part of the joke.  Who is French and who’s Saunders? 

And the content of the sketches is under-written and under-rehearsed.  It means that good jokes are often stranded, or left dangling so the punchlines don’t land.  Any joke that works is revisited for far too long, such as a great method acting pun that runs on long after the audience enjoyment wears thin. 

The lack of shape is particularly problematic because Johnson and Holloway tackle some big topics, like sexual harassment and sexist casting in the film/television industry.  The more controversial or personal the topic, the sharper the point of view has to be to make sure the punches land exactly where they’re aimed.

But I’m not sure who the butt of the joke is.  So scenes re-enacting industry sexist casting sessions come off as ‘frat-boy level’ humour.  There’s little insight, and not enough characterization to make it a Christopher Guest-ian satire of individual/ industry hubris.  

There’s a lot of doing the thing and then saying, “just kidding!” as if that negates the fact that the show just did the thing it’s meant to be skewering.  Add to that Holloway’s late in the show ad-libbed rape joke, which reads as victim blaming rather than an indictment of sexual predators … 

It all adds up to a show that doesn’t know its point of view, and just reinforces the thing it criticizes. It is a shame, first because ad-libbed rape joke; second because when Holloway and Johnson have a strong structure behind the comedy, there’s real sparkle. 

A great example of the two working well together is a sketch where Johnson brilliantly narrates a movie trailer which Holloway must act out.  I enjoy the interplay between the performers as the performance challenges build, and the end is pure off-the-wall absurdity.  Matching the wacky content to movie trailer structure gives the audience anchor points.  We recognize where things are going off course.  So it is hardly a surprise that the most unified laughs of the night come during this sketch.

But without that rigor or structure to the whole show, 50 Minutes plus Jokes comes off as a bunch of undirected, lazy pseudo-comedy. 

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