The anticipation in a theater right before you see a show is always electric. Taking your tickets at the piss office, awkwardly shuffling into your seat past all the pisstrons who showed up 20 minutes early, cracking open your pissbill and learning about who’s who in the cast and crew.
Maybe take a quick piss if you’ve got time, and your way back from the bathroom treating yourself to an oversized souvenir cup filled with a nice, tall, frothy mellow yellow. I’ve got piss
on the mind these days. And after experiencing PISS.JPG (WORKING TITLE), so will you!
PISS.JPG (WORKING TITLE), is the kind of deranged masterpiece that truly defines a genre. A lot of very apt comparisons are being drawn to Waiting for Godot, but writer/performers Justin Jager and Michael Gardiner escape Beckett’s all-consuming gravity well by elevating their
absurism to newer, stupider heights. Don’t get me wrong, though, you’ve gotta be really smart to make something look this stupid. From the big things, such as the fully cardboard set, to the small, like the beautifully crafted pissbill, it paints a picture of a team that took great care to make sure every bizarre detail was perfect.
Daniel Yaiullo’s direction here is grandiose and has much of the same brilliant attention to detail. The jokes are snappy, sharp, and come at you a mile a minute. Every line is a setup for a gag,
and every punchline is a callback. The use of repetition, physical comedy, repetition, clowning, and repetition turns the comedy inward onto itself like a surrealist ouroboros, and delivers humor that feels right at home with the best work of Tim and Eric or Wham City.
There’s one moment in particular where everything clicked into place perfectly: Gardiner as Martin, I mean Roger, is standing over Jager, throwing glassware at his limp body on the ground.
Not real glass, mind you, it’s all mimed out, but everything from Gardiner’s prop work, the audio cue of glass shattering, and the jerking motion of Jager getting ‘hit’ by the pantomimed glass, all sync up perfectly a grand total of ten (10) times. How do I know it was 10? Because Roger proudly declares, “Ten!”, on the 10th glass as a callback to another joke about 10 minutes ago.
Sharp counting skills there, Roger! There isn’t a single moment of PISS.JPG (WORKING TITLE) that isn’t both dumb as fuck and brilliantly inspired. I don’t want to give away too much here, but there’s also a very heartfelt dynamic between Martin and Roger that pokes its head up every so often, and Gardiner’s grand punchline towards the end threads the needle of a comedy that makes you cry. I was tearing up
at PISS.JPG (WORKING TITLE). If you told me I’d be crying during a surreal, absurdist comedy, I’d say you were taking the piss.
The Independent Artists movement 