COPYRIGHT © COWARDS OMNIMEDIA 2007
COPYRIGHT © COWARDS OMNIMEDIA 2007
FUN ON THE RUN FOR THE COWARDS
By JIM SLOTEK, TORONTO SUNAugust 16, 1999
It didn't always take two to tango in front of a comedy crowd.
In the '80s, there was but one Toronto comedy duo of note, the legendary Al & George. And then there were a number of years when duos were as extinct as dodos.
But in the mid-to-late '90s, comics started to pair off like turtle doves. There've been male/female duos (Kevlor 2000, Laura McGhee & Frank McAnulty), Gen-X male duos (Joe's Convenience, Joke Boy, Brock & John, Two Guys), female duos (The Lolas) and the ever-popular two-guys-and-a-guitar (The Cowards, Pamplemousse, and the current kings of the genre, Fast & Dirty).
"I'm sure there are at least 20 duos in town," says Dave Pearce of The Cowards, who headline three days of celebrations for Pearce's 32nd birthday, Thursday to Saturday at Second City's Tim Sims Playhouse. Besides being one of the busier duos, The Cowards have become social convenors for twosomes with their bi-annual Duos And Donuts mini-festivals. The next one's in November, which should coincide with the release of The Cowards' first CD.
This weekend, Pearce and partner Mark Richardson welcome friends, including Pamplemousse and Peterborough duo Gardeners Of Eden, halves of duos (Gord Oxley of Fast & Dirty and Brock Simpson of Brock & John), standup Ophira Eisenberg and troupe veterans Marcel St. Pierre and Nick Johne.
Pearce and Richardson, who go into the studio this week to record their CD, have known each other for five years. They've performed as a duo for only two. "We met through mutual friends," says Pearce. "He actually married a woman who lived on my couch for about six weeks, a friend from my roommate's hometown."
A trained actor, Richardson "just needed an outlet for a lot of weird ideas," Pearce says, "and I had been getting into the improv side (he broke in at the now defunct Big City Improv when The Chumps ran the place). Our first show was at The Oasis, one of the old Shake The Monkey Tree shows. To our surprise, we got a lot of great response from people who weren't our friends -- which is the best test of material."
The two were big fans of Wayne & Shuster, "because as hokey as they come across now, they were very smart. You needed a little bit of an education to get, say, the Julius Caesar bit ('I'll have a martinus -- You mean a martini -- If I wanted more than one, I'd ask for it').
"The best example of that in our show is The Friggin Guys, which is actually based on a conversation I heard at a bar in Sudbury -- two guys going, 'It f---in' is!' Well, we changed it to, 'It friggin' is! It friggin' isn't!' And it went back and forth and finally one guy turns to me and says, 'Hey buddy, how many Canadian dollars in a lira?'
"An incongruous thing, that that was the subject of the argument, rather than hockey or mining or whatever. We turned it into a piece about two guys arguing whether it was Pol Pot or Bok Choy who was dictator of Cambodia."
Other bits lean on Richardson's Shakespearean training, like the one with two members of the Royal Shakespeare Co. hosting MuchMusic's The Mix after a cultural exchange sends Master T to London. "They're desperately trying to be cool, quoting James Brown in a grand style, from Licking Stick, Living In America and Sex Machine."
And then there's the music, much of which hinges on Pearce's but increasingly-adept guitar playing. Their favourite song: Ladies Who Read The News, a mash note to various talking heads, with lyrics like, "I wanna have sex with the ladies who read the news/I wanna sip champagne from Suhana Meharchand's shoes ..."
During this week's recording sessions, they'll be backed on the song by the all-lesbian Boys Choir Of Lesbos. No joke.
"We hired them because bringing together disparate beliefs and sexual orientations is our real goal," says Pearce, who adds with a laugh: "No it's not!"