The Boiled Wieners have been together long enough to regret having called themselves, well, you know, the Boiled Wieners. At least that’s the way the troupe’s newest member tells it, thinking back to a tour stop somewhere in 613 Ontario, when the dinner theater they were playing for two nights added a special item to the menu in their honor.

Boiled wiener pate. Yum.

“That sticks out as the chanciest meat I’ve ever eaten,” says Julianne Baragar, nodding to the title of the their upcoming anniversary show. “Pate and boiled wieners are two really unappealing things.”

“But I ate some of it,” she adds cheerfully, seated with her troupemates in a bare-bones coffee shop near their rehearsal space, “and it was really salty,” which is probably the only thing that spared her life.

Call it a drawback of touring so much, something the four Wieners take seriously as a means of refining and re-refining their act — admirable but odd considering that they all come from improv.

“In improv it’s just there and then it’s gone,” says Melanie Hunter who, together with Paul Snepsts, are the only ones left of the six or seven people (there is some confusion on this point) who formed the troupe in the summer of 2003. “When you do something more than one you’ve got an opportunity to refine it, to make it work better.”

Their sketches tend to be pretty short — just two or three minutes, they’re like The Ramones of Toronto sketch — so after five years they’ve built up and polished quite a catalog.

For the anniversary show they’ve worked out some new stuff, including some song and dance, though the matinee at Second City might also mark the final performance of a sketch that’s big with the fans. Maybe you’ve seen it? Ben McLean on guitar, Snepsts in the pastel sports jacket, dancing like a bobble-headed eighth grader?

“Oh god, can we burn the wig?” says Hunter.

They all groan and laugh at the mention of their Hall and Oates bit, in which the '80s pop duo botch an audition for The Lion King soundtrack by playing the same inappropriate song again and again — to the irritation of a Disney executrix. Nothing fancy, just two guys who don’t get the message.

“We’d love to retire it,” says Snepsts. “That one has been kicking around pretty much since day one.” But the fans love it (something about the dancing is pretty funny) and now the Wieners can’t get away from it. It’s become their own personal Parrot Sketch.

“But I think we can safely say this will be it,” he adds.

McLean wrote the sketch. After a certain number of performances, “you assume everyone else in the world has seen it,” he says from underneath a baseball cap. “But I guess if I was seeing a band I like, I’d be the one yelling ‘Yeah, play the song you wrote when you were 18!’”



Best bets:
Letterman follow-up Craig Fersguson plays Massey Hall Saturday. No word yet if he brought his Aquaman costume or any silly monkeys.

Alex Nussbaum is up from L.A. and headlines Absolute Comedy Wednesday through Saturday. Among the things on his mind, he says, are mixed feeling about carpooling. “On some days it feels to me like another reminder that I’m alone.” Franco Taddeo is also on the bill.