Jamaine Ross, James Roque and Pax Assadi combine to make the supposedly mighty comic force that is Frickin Dangerous Bro.  Sort of like a would-be comedy Voltron – a reference that elderly 34 year-old Jamaine might need to explain to his millennial whippersnapper cohorts.

They open with an ironic sketch about socio-politically erudite cuzzy-bros at a school lunchtime Dungeons and Dragons session, even before their official rowdy introduction.  There’s a sense that the structure is based on a television format: likely both a strong influence on the trio’s comedy and a logical aspiration to work towards.

The premise, as divulged by the flashy black-and-white hip-hop swag video, is that they were given a decent chunk of funding to produce this show, which was quickly spent on absurd frivolities.  So now the show is a kind of brainstorm of ideas to raise the necessaries to pay off their debts, interspersed with classic character-based sketches, including a couple of technically quite ambitious concepts.  These are generally followed by a brief section of deconstructional analysis about whether the scene worked or not, and why.

There’s certainly a palpable chemistry between Jamaine’s irreverent wit, Pax’s droll intensity and James’s babyfaced cheek, playing into the well-worn stereotypes of their respective ethnicities with effective results on the old laughometer.  Regularly cracking themselves and each other up, the overall style and humour is nothing if not loose, buoyed considerably by the well lubricated 10pm capacity Festival crowd’s keen readiness to be entertained. 

Meanwhile the potential fundraising options periodically mooted by the boys, with further suggestions invited from the audience, are voted on at the end, to select the option to run with.  Not to give too much away, I suspect the outcome is possibly rigged to some degree, and the ultimate punchline comes after you thought it was all over. 

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