Funny women the Flirty Boys and Bullshit Women put on one of the best shows of the Toronto Sketch Festival. Gutsily overt in their sexual humour and impressively committed to their characters, their sketches were as unique as they were hilarious.
The Flirty Boys' primary strength was their ability to push candid characters into absurd territory by adding the optimal number of heightened attributes. For example, they pushed their scene in which two polite middle-aged couples made small talk after an orgy from natural to absurdist with only two things: fake moustaches, and ridiculous made-up sexual idioms. In the same vein, the Flirty Boys also sang a song in which they played men objectifying women with comical brazenness, then segued into a scene where a group of men with frat-like personalities sheepishly admitted that they were sexually unaccomplished.
One of the troupe members appeared on stage shirtless for a sketch about life drawing in which another troupe member played her mother and described her body with an oddly sensual level of detail. Moreover, the troupe conducted a show called "Wash Yo Ass" in which a veterinarian gruesomely spoke about anally stimulating a monkey with her mouth that was as funny as it was cringe-worthy.
Bullshit Women also had a good deal of suggestive material. Their power-point slides between sketches that asked the audience to guess what each troupe member's vagina looked like were crudely funny, as were their slides that showed several anagrams, all of which featured the c-word. Furthermore, their closer in which a gynaecologist used a seemingly endless number of slang terms for genitals while examining a patient was also hilarious in its vulgarity.
However, not all of the show's material was based in sexual humour. Bullshit Women performed a impressively fast-paced sketch in which three catty American women revealed to each other that they secretly hated each other's guts. They acted out a brilliantly satirical advertisement for an anti-aging product called Revlon 45 which was simply a pretty gun for consumers to shoot themselves with on their 45th birthday. Similarly, they showed a darkly funny series of slides in which they showed an image of a benign but disgusting cancer, and performed a sketch in which women planned their funerals with the same romanticism as most women plan their weddings. Both of these bits were straightforward and smart, yet wonderfully atypical and shocking.
The Flirty Boys' primary strength was their ability to push candid characters into absurd territory by adding the optimal number of heightened attributes. For example, they pushed their scene in which two polite middle-aged couples made small talk after an orgy from natural to absurdist with only two things: fake moustaches, and ridiculous made-up sexual idioms. In the same vein, the Flirty Boys also sang a song in which they played men objectifying women with comical brazenness, then segued into a scene where a group of men with frat-like personalities sheepishly admitted that they were sexually unaccomplished.
One of the troupe members appeared on stage shirtless for a sketch about life drawing in which another troupe member played her mother and described her body with an oddly sensual level of detail. Moreover, the troupe conducted a show called "Wash Yo Ass" in which a veterinarian gruesomely spoke about anally stimulating a monkey with her mouth that was as funny as it was cringe-worthy.
Bullshit Women also had a good deal of suggestive material. Their power-point slides between sketches that asked the audience to guess what each troupe member's vagina looked like were crudely funny, as were their slides that showed several anagrams, all of which featured the c-word. Furthermore, their closer in which a gynaecologist used a seemingly endless number of slang terms for genitals while examining a patient was also hilarious in its vulgarity.
However, not all of the show's material was based in sexual humour. Bullshit Women performed a impressively fast-paced sketch in which three catty American women revealed to each other that they secretly hated each other's guts. They acted out a brilliantly satirical advertisement for an anti-aging product called Revlon 45 which was simply a pretty gun for consumers to shoot themselves with on their 45th birthday. Similarly, they showed a darkly funny series of slides in which they showed an image of a benign but disgusting cancer, and performed a sketch in which women planned their funerals with the same romanticism as most women plan their weddings. Both of these bits were straightforward and smart, yet wonderfully atypical and shocking.