Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Shameless Plugs: The Rocket Scientists are the BEST OF THE FESTIVAL!

Last time we checked in with my sketch comedy troupe The Rocket Scientists (composed of myself, Brandon Hackett, Chris Small and Kevin MacNeil) we were just about to go on stage at the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival! Well, just letting you know, it went well.

BECAUSE WE WON A FREAKIN’ AWARD!!


The Rocket Scientists were lucky enough to be the recipients of the Steamwhistle Producer’s Pick Award at SketchFest this year! There were four awards at the Festival – one chosen by the audience, one by a panel of judges, one by the performers, and one by the festival producers. The Producer’s Pick Award is obviously the one the producers took care of. It was awarded to us not only because we were pretty funny but because we were consistently going out to a myriad of SketchFest events and participating in all the extra shows around the festival like Nerd Off and Sketch-U-Bator. This was mostly on Chris’ insistence, due to my crippling inability to have fun with other people and fear of public laughter (difficult for a comedian) but I’m sure glad we got into the spirit of the Festival and participated! Technically I wasn’t actually at the event where we won the award – I was being a lame-o sitting at home on a Sunday night watching Star Wars on Blu-ray when Chris called me and said “WE WON AN AWARD! YOU’RE NOT HEEEERE!” Apparently Brandon literally yelled “WHAT?!” when they announced we’d won. It was a very pleasant surprise!

The award not only gets us a bunch of free Steamwhistle Beer swag (I’ve heard it rumored that last year’s recipients got a lot more free beer than they were expecting, which is bad for my current attempt to get abs but great for my sense of joy) but we more importantly got an automatic spot in the “Best of the Festival” encore show this Friday the 14th at Measure (formerly the Poor Alex)!

Technically the show is part of NXNE, which is pretty darn cool. I don’t know when NXNE started incorporating Comedy into their programming, but I’m pretty freakin’ excited to say I’m playing the same festival as The National. And Ludacris. I mean come one. I’m much closer to being a rock star now.

We’re incredibly excited to be sharing the stage with two incredible sketch troupes, She Said What and Deadpan Powerpoint. I saw Deadpan Powerpoint’s set at Sketchfest back in February and it was absofreakin’lutely incredimazing. Two months later and I’m still chuckling to myself occasionally over their lecture “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Dogs.” It’s entirely possible that the Encore Show will be Deadpan Powerpoint’s final performance, so I’d come out just to be able to see their schtick before you can’t anymore. Seriously, they’re incredibly funny people.

The Rocket Scientists are going to be bringing back some of our very favourite bits for this Encore show – we’ve only got a fifteen minute opening act slot in the show, so we know we’ve got to make every gag count! We tested the set out at Chris and Brandon’s high school on Monday (the Grade 12 drama class just did a sketch comedy unit and we were invited to give them a short performance and give a talk-back as ‘industry professionals’ – HA. THE FOOLS) and it went over excellently. Fingers crossed this discerning Friday night audience will agree!

You can get tickets for the show RIGHT NOW! And I suggest you do!  Hope to see you there!

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