I was just thinking to myself, it really has been a long time since someone has brought a good, strange surrealist comedy show ala Kids in the Hall or The State into the world, let alone this city. Just as the thought popped into my head, Baltimore-based Wham City Comedy announced they would be making their way to Richmond next month for a one of a kind show.
Initially created in 2004 as the Wham City Art Collective by a group of friends who met at New York’s Purchase College, the collective over time evolved into various things, including Wham City Comedy as it is now known. However, despite initially meeting in New York, it was the convenience and relative underdog status that drew all of the members, including founding member Ben O’Brien, down to Baltimore, Maryland.
“There’s a lot of warehouse spaces for artists to live in, there’s an art school and it’s placed kind of conveniently on the eastern seaboard where New York is a three-hour trip, DC is an hour away,” O’Brien said. “A lot of the people in the collective and all of us have been determined to be working artists and musicians and stuff like that, so I think we saw it as a way of not falling into the trap of having to pay these big bills and get a job we didn’t enjoy, and kind of our way to keep making art in the way that we wanted to.”
With such a unique and absurdist style, it is unsurprising that Wham City’s comedic inspiration runs the gamut. Between early days of performing at music shows with bands, to interacting with their audiences, to even founding member Robby Rackleff’s obsession with mundane things like Best Buy and Amtrak, it’s interesting to see how this concoction comes together to create a hot stew known as the Wham City Comedy show.
“We love to involve the audience in whatever way we can think of,” O’Brien said. “Just in general be unpredictable in that way, so that’s where that style came from. We almost always have a routine that acknowledges the audience that isn’t a skit so much as it’s like a big presentation. We perform as people who know they are in front of the crowd which allows{us} to create that kind of interaction and those layers that we enjoy.”
At the suggestion of Adult Swim editor and ‘Off the Air’ creator, Dave Hughes, and with some mystical luck, the collective submitted a pitch to Adult Swim. Since then, Wham City has created a series of bizarre infomercials for Adult Swim such as “Unedited Footage of A Bear” and “Live Forever As You Are Now”.
With so many platforms for the collective to perform on between live shows, Adult Swim, and videos, they try to keep everything as separate as possible. Although sometimes, the expected overlap works out for the best in their favor.
“I will say that the most recent thing we’ve done with Adult Swim, which was called ‘Cry of Man’, which was a live streaming soap opera, where people could call in and talk to the actors who are performing at that moment,” O’Brien said. “That was the best marriage between our video work and our performance.”
Ever since Wham City began touring in 2010, even before their start with Adult Swim, the River City has always been one of the group’s top tour stops on their list. Their love of Richmond became cultivated after realizing it was the first place outside of Baltimore that any sort of fan-base was really growing. “It’s been a sort of special place for us to play,” said O’Brien. “I just love to perform in front of audiences that love to have fun and laugh, and Richmond falls into that category big time.”
And when it comes to their roles, the members, and crew where many different hats. O’Brien and fellow Wham City member Cricket Arrison will do a lot of the producing, fellow founding members Robby Rackleff and Alan Resnick will do a lot of the directing. The writing is mostly a collaborative effort, and depending on whose idea they are working on, they will take the lead.
“Robby himself is an amazing writer, he’s very prolific so he’s a very fast writer. He often has great ideas so he’s often writing. We all wrote parts of ‘Cry of Mann’, the thing I’m doing on Audible, I’m doing with my brother so it’s all different,” O’Brien said. “The way that we collaborate is if someone comes up with an idea and we’re excited about it, we pursue that idea, we pitch it, that pitch gets bought by someone, then whoever started that pitch gets to choose who writes with them.”
Originally described on the pitch document as something along the lines of a sitcom meets a Japanese horror film, but wackier, the collective took a detour from their usual brand of comedy to create “This House Has People in It”. Instead of sticking with the infomercial format they were using on Adult Swim, they decided to try expanding and see what they were capable of, and just how badly they can mess with whoever is watching at the wee hours of 4 AM.
“I think this was Alan’s idea. We listed a bunch of stuff, and we had a bunch of ideas that we could do,” O’Brien said. “We had the commercial that becomes a horror, and then at that time, Alan had an idea that you just turn on the TV and there are security cameras. So I think we kind of developed that idea for our next pitch. Then we kind of took it from there and kept expanding.”
While Wham City Comedy shows are always interesting in their own way, and like a live extension of their video work from the internet and Adult Swim, if nothing else, O’Brien said their goal is for “people to have some sort of unique experience”. I’m sure that will be the case when they hit Gallery5’s stage on Sun., May 6.
Tickets are on sale now, $8 in advance or at Steady Sounds, or $10 at the door. Show starts at 8 PM.
