Michael Ian Black & Nick Thune

Just For Laughs, Montreal QC, July 26

BY Julianna RomanykPublished Jul 27, 2018

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If you were playing a game where you had to list similar comedians, you'd never say that Michael Ian Black (pictured) and Nick Thune go together like birds of a feather. Black was part of legendary sketch group The State in the '90s, as well as the movie Wet Hot American Summer, while Nick Thune only rose to prominence recently with his musing musical comedy. Nonetheless, the two comedians complement each other swimmingly, despite the disparity of their generations and genres.
 
After some ad-libbing between the two comics and a quick coin toss to determine which one of them would perform first, Michael Ian Black took the stage and masterfully kept the audience on their toes with the most suspenseful story about getting a sandwich at Subway that will ever be told. For over ten minutes, the importance of whether the sandwich artist accidentally put cucumber on Black's sandwich felt like a captivating life or death matter, and it had everyone cackling. Furthermore, the bets that Michael Ian Black made with a teenager in the audience about the sandwich story were even funnier. By the time he was making his last wager with the 18-year-old, Black's wallet was empty and all he had left to bet was a library card and a New York metro card with six bucks on it.
 
Nick Thune wasn't as electrically funny as Black, so the second act felt like a denouement as opposed to a flourishing finish. It was easy to see that the show would've been better if Black went after Thune, but Thune was still far from disappointing. He wasn't hilariously funny, but his unbelievably dry humour was subtly magnetic. Thune's terse one-liners took a while to figure out, but were satisfying once you'd decoded them, while his more straightforward story about hearing a woman "shit her brains out" had a surprisingly heartwarming ending despite its crude premise.

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