Monkey Toast and Jam
Improvisers go long in search of laughs
From the National Post, October 23, 2004

Comedian David Shore recently decided to tweak the traditional improv format of rapid-fire mind games made famous by the television show Whose Line is it Anyway? by creating a venue for long-form improvisation.

He calls his breakthrough Monkey Toast. In it, 12 improvisers take the raw narrative material provided by a guest monologist and remix This is Your Life moments into This Could Have Been Your Life flights of fancy. Rather than re-enact the monologist's stories, the troupe reimagines them completely.

Describing the precise formula that Monkey Toast employs is difficult, but the resulting laughs are easy to quantify. Former guest monologists include Dan Redican (Puppets Who Kill) and Matt Watts (The Newsroom). After only a year and a half of performances, the show has been nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award for Best Improv Troupe. Even better, CBC radio recently came sniffing around, and are now interested in a pilot based on the format.

Shore admits he adapted the idea for the show from a Chicago improv format called The Armando Diaz Experience. Shore, who first honed his standup riffs in high school, and began improvising while in university, moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1990s after earning his degree in radio and television arts at Ryerson. While in L.A., he grew attached to Improv Olympic West, a club that specializes in long-form improv. After moving back to Toronto in the Spring of 2001, Shore found himself working on the Second City mainstage, and later launched Monkey Toast, which takes place on the first and second Tuesday of every month in the Tim Sims Playhouse.

Audience response has been encouraging, Shore says: "We have people who come back every other week. It's a bad time slot, but it's a great show."

Shore is not only a funny guy, but he's media savvy, too. At a recent Monkey Toast, he invites me to appear as guest of honour, to judge the experience at stage level. Since only the stupidest of critics would dare denigrate a production of which they a part, take my praise of the show with a modicum of suspicion.

The night of my cameo, I discover that, at the behest of CBC radio, the Monkey Toast format has been tweaked slightly. Instead of telling long, rambling stories, David Shore interviews me about my life (a nice switcheroo, since, as a reporter, I'm more used to asking questions than answering them).

Because any trivial detail can form the basis of a sketch, improvisers are encouraged to think laterally. When Shore asks if I've ever experienced writer's block, I explain that a journalist unable to write to deadline is equivalent to a bricklayer unable to manipulate a trowel and mortar. A scene or two later, improviser Dave Pierce is in the middle of building a brick wall for an orphanage when he's hit with an "existential crisis" that leaves him too paralyzed to continue. A minute later, the (imaginary) brick wall topples upon a poor little orphan girl (played by Jennine Profeta). Needless to say, you had to be there.

Indeed, recounting the slippery, fleeting moments of improv after the fact is generally futile. Improv, after all, is an of-the- moment art form: We laugh at the funny while unsuccessful moments quickly drop forever into the memory hole.

But since the skill level is high at Monkey Toast, few comedic bombs are detonated. As Shore notes, "Improv is all about trust and risk-taking. And improvisers will take big risks in our show because they know they'll be backed up."

During the second half of the show, host Shore asks me to clarify a misconception about myself. Being tall isn't all sunshine and rainbows, I tell him. "I suffer from lower back pain. And there's nothing interesting or sexy about that."

As if responding to a triple-dog dare, improviser Bruce Hunter immediately begins a scene in which comedians Tabitha Wells and Aurora Browne throw themselves at him as if his lumbar pain and scoliosis were a chiselled jaw and six-pack abs. "I meet a lot of girls," says Hunter, partway through the scene, describing his unique brand of animal magnetism. "They see how tall... and how pained I am." Were it only true.

The improvisers are drawn from a floating pool of around 50, with occasional appearances by Colin Mochrie (Whose Line is it Anyway?) and Lisa Merchant (Train 48). "Monkey Toast is much more challenging than short-form improv, and as a performer it's a lot more fun," Shore says. "And I think the audience enjoys it more too. The improvisers get much bigger laughs."