The Dark Show
Second Tuesday of every month, 8:30pm
Absolute Comedy
235 Yonge
$10
As God as my witness, it really was a dark and stormy night. Stormy outside, when what felt like a little monsoon opened up over the city on Tuesday night, and dark inside Absolute Comedy, where a damp audience heard all about eating babies, the acrid smell of post-asparagus urine and other unprintables from comics like Fraser Young and Guy Earle.
The Dark Show — a new and monthly to-do at the club, put together by host Andrew Evans — is a sort of free-for-all for comics, a chance to get up to their elbows in the sort of blue-and-black stuff that might not fly in the more PG-13 rooms around town.
"Fundraisers, corporate affairs, TV spots…" says Evans, counting dull gigs on his fingers after the show, "they've dictated a hold on comedy about what you can and cannot do." He wants the Dark Show to be a free-for-all, chemo to the cancer that is Club 54, where comics and comedy-goers can both test their limits.
And who better to put high on the bill than Earle — who just happens to be in hot water right now with the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal over remarks he allegedly made at some audience members in Vancouver. No big surprise, the ordeal seems to have handed him a lot of material and Earle — together with Young and a very funny Dave Martin — did a lot in the back half of the show to make up for some flops that had just about cleared the room earlier on.
Evans, a nimble comic in his own right who does a lot to hold the room together, says there's "no groaning allowed" during the Dark Show but the crowd doesn't always agree, and didn't take well to the sloppy self-indulgence of David Reuben or Mike Ross.
Things turned around when Martin took the stage with a daring bit about Parkinson's Disease leading into Young, who's always funny if you can follow what he's saying, and a winning set stocked with dead hookers and six year-olds.