Film / Interviews
Meet the Comedians’ Cinema Club
It’s a simple yet remarkably effective idea: why not get a bunch of film enthusiast comedians up on stage to improvise their way through a well-known movie in no more than an hour? Founded by Eric Lampeart and Matthew Highton in London three years ago, the Comedians’ Cinema Club was initially conceived as an Edinburgh Festival show. It proved an instant hit with audiences, who queued to see their favourite films ruined in a feast of chaotic idiocy, and has been a Time Out Critics’ Choice every month since February 2015. The Guardian hailed it as: “One of the best audience-participation comedy shows at Edinburgh Festival: In Indiana Jones, punters became elephants to ride the cast through India; in Jaws they were cast as the ocean, beach dwellers, underwater corpses and John Williams. In Pulp Fiction, one man who was chosen to chip in as Harvey Keitel took over the show, after it became apparent he knew every line of the film.”
https://youtu.be/IT7Z86eXY-M
Today, the Comedians’ Cinema Club has expanded to include residencies at the Top Secret Comedy Club in London’s West End, Komedia in Brighton and in LA, where Lampeart is now based. They also perform one-off shows across the country and make their second visit to the Cube this month as the centrepiece of the microplex’s Paul Verhoeven season. They’ll be doing – ulp! – Basic Instinct. But doesn’t everyone want to be Sharon Stone? “I’m sure there are going to be some debates,” admits Matthew. “But the main roles are actually the hardest ones. As a comedian, you end up being the straight guy.”
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Indeed, experience forced the chucklemeisters to revise many of their initial assumptions. “There’s no film that doesn’t work at all but there are definitely films that don’t work as well. We found out very quickly that action films are really hard to do. We thought they’d be easier. We did The Matrix, for example, but none of us can do Kung Fu. It’s funny for about 30 seconds and then you realise that there are just so many action scenes. The films that work really well are the ones that have clear archetypes, like Disney films. They’re just gold because they’ve got very strong characters. There’s a villain and a hero and you can just play around that. And when you’re doing a Disney film in an adult environment, the tone of it just changes.”
Although the shows have never gone horribly wrong, there have been some close calls. Last year, they decided to do an Oscar season in Edinburgh, but realised too late that so many of the winners are unremittingly grim. “Dallas Buyers Club is about AIDS. We couldn’t do that, obviously. So we did it about Matthew McConaughey getting a cold.”
And the best ones? “We all have our own favourites. Mine is Flash Gordon, just because it’s so nuts. When you sit down and start doing it, you think, ‘This is insane!’ The Neverending Story worked really well too. Anything that’s got something big and stupid that we can get the audience to join in. We like to get them involved as best we can without them feeling picked on. So when we did Point Break, we got four of them to haul us up to do skydiving. Sometimes we’ll get them up to be a horse or something.”
With a core team of around five comedians working on each show, there is a certain amount of organisation underpinning the improvisational mayhem. “All we have is a scene list. So basically, we all watch the film and then do a brief scene synopsis, just so when you’re offstage you can remember what’s coming next. But depending on what happens, or what the audience gives you, you can sometimes have a huge subplot running through it that you never knew existed. We’ve done Jurassic Park three times now. Because there are so many of us, we always cast each other in different parts, so it’s never the same twice.”
You don’t actually need to be a movie nerd to enjoy the show, and Matthew reports that there’s generally a small percentage of people in the audience who’ve never seen the film that’s being destroyed before their eyes. “But generally, the more well-known the film the easier it is. You can set up running jokes. There’s a festival in Wells that started last year and we closed it with Hot Fuzz because it’s the town where they filmed it. They know it so well. It’s crazy how much it means to that town.”
At festivals such as Latitude, they’ve occasionally passed the choice of film to the audience with a Twitter vote. That’s a brave move. Have the punters ever ganged up and demanded an arthouse misery epic, like a Bela Tarr movie? “No, but I’d love to do that,” laughs Matthew. “In fact, the one I’d really love to do is Bergman’s The Seventh Seal…”
The Comedians’ Cinema Club performance of Basic Instinct takes place at the Cube on Saturday, April 8. Go here for tickets.
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