If you thought sketch comedy is not what it used to be, then you haven’t experienced BriTANicK.
BriTANicK is a sketch comedy duo made up of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, veteran comedy writers for SNL who decided six years ago to go from the page to the stage, where their show has performed to rave reviews and included a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
To put it succinctly, after catching their show at Theatre St. Catherine as part of the OFF-JFL series, this show is a laugh riot. Period.
Brian and Nick take the sketch comedy genre and bring it to an insane level. They constantly break down that fourth wall with reckless abandon and use a lot of running jokes that fit in so well, and are not used for the sake of cheap laughs. And when they go off the rails — especially with the fart museum sketch that closed the show — which happens not once, but about four times (in which this reviewer unexpectedly gets dragged into the madness) it’s greeted with louder and more uproarious laughter. There is not a weak sketch throughout the show, with the New York City restaurant recommendations and the poor memory clinic (which is a fine tribute to Monty Python) as personal favourites.
So in conclusion, there are two more things I have to say about the BriTANicK sketch show: GO SEE IT!; and get ready to experience the classic case of laughing until your sides ache.
For more information, or to purchase tickets, to BriTANicK or any other Just For Laughs show, go to hahaha.com.
Stuart Nulman was born and raised in Montreal. He began his journalism career in 1980 as an entertainment reporter/reviewer for the Vanier College student newspaper. Two years later, he worked as a summer student intern at CBC Montreal, where he worked in the English TV news division, CBC Radio and CBC Communications. During the late 80s, he worked as an assistant copy editor and columnist for The Suburban Newspaper for three years, and then joined the staff of the Hampstead/Weekly Herald before it closed in 1991. Stuart also worked as a comedy researcher/writer for the Just For Laughs festival, where he was responsible for creating and editing the festival's entire advertising and program book copy for the 1994 edition, as well as providing background research about comedians who performed there. After a seven-year stint as a technical editor for the flight simulator company CAE Inc., Stuart returned to the world of journalism, writing book reviews, covering the Montreal summer festival scene, conducting celebrity interviews and writing travel pieces for a number of platforms, such as the Montreal Times, BestStory.ca (a long form journalism website), and his blog Stuart Nulman's Grapevine. As well, since 2009, he does a book review segment called "Book Banter", which is heard twice a month on The Stuph File Program with Peter Anthony Holder podcast, which evolved from the segment of the same name he did for 19 years on CJAD's "Holder Tonight/Overnight" program. He also authored the book "Beyond the Mountain: True Tales About Montreal", which was published in 2002 and was a local bestseller, which peaked at #2 on the Gazette's nonfiction best seller list. Stuart is currently semi-retired after working for 20 years at the English Montreal School Board (EMSB), and still writes articles, reads and reviews books, and travels more frequently.
