Like most nerds, the guys behind Approximately 3 Peters have put a lot of thought into time travel — “Should I buy Apple stock in 1980 or try to kill Hitler?” — though, in this case, Peter Gal, Pete Hill and Ian MacIntyre came up with enough material on the subject to fill an entire show.

“Someone had a great idea for a sketch, in this case it was Pete,” says MacIntyre, pointing to Hill who is seated at the other end of a conference table upstairs at Second City, “and we couldn’t figure out a way to end it. But we kept coming up with a ton of ideas to keep it going way too long. So we were like, ‘Ah, just break it up and make a bunch of sketches.’”

“But we made sure to populate it with some other stuff,” Hill jumps in, “so that it isn’t all about fucking up time-space and causality loops.”

Playing Thursday nights this month — right after Facebook of Revelations which, coincidentally, also includes a time-travel skit — Pet3rs Kill Time is the second revue from the troupe and the first, they say, conceived as an entire show. Their first, in January was more of a hodge-podge, says MacIntyre.

“The first one we took all our favorite sketches… and chucked them all into one show,” he adds. “This revue feels more cohesive. We were like, ‘OK, we’ve got no new material. We should write something.’” Kill Time includes a little bit of everything they’ve written since February, they say.

The Peters have had a busy year since then. They hold court once a month at the Cameron House, testing new material and fine-tuning the old, and in the spring played the inaugural Orillia Comedy Festival just as MacIntyre wrapped a grueling stint on the CBC reality show Second City’s Next Comedy Legend.

Although the new show is hung on the idea of time travel, according to the Peters it’s also about the obsessive nerd that lurks inside us all.

“A lot of our material is about stuff that people take too seriously,” says Hill, whether it’s Star Wars or the Blue Jays or Grey’s Anatomy or home decorating shows. There’s something in their life that they’re slightly OCD about — that’s their guilty pleasure.

“A political junkie is no different from a crack addict, is no different from the guy who lined up for three hours to see Michael Bay’s Transformers,” he continues, settling into what sounds like a well-practiced spiel. “It doesn’t matter what you nerd out about. Geeking on something is universal”

OK, but that raises the question: what are their guilty, geeky pleasures? MacIntyre is the first to ’fess up — he geeks on with comic books — while Hill puts himself in the “political junkie” category, though he complains that he found last week’s election boring and scripted.

Gall stops and thinks for a minute. “Yesterday I was nerding out about apples,” he deadpans, adding only that, “there’s one special apple that’s amazing. Also Star Wars, Firefly and Smashing Pumpkins.”

Pet3rs Kill Time runs Thursdays until Oct 25 at 11pm. $11. Second City, 51 Mercer. www.3peters.com.

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