After a two-year hiatus, half-naked troupe The Comic Strippers is taking the stage again in Victoria. Over the last 10 years, the Strippers have been performing across North America and beyond; this crew of entertainers and improv comedians are friends who have been specializing in comedy for 30 years. Comic Stripper Roman Danylo has appeared on television comedies such as Comedy Inc. and Corner Gas, and movies such as Duets and Free Willy 3: The Rescue Pizza Kid. But at the heart of it all, the Comic Strippers are all friends who happen to be improv comedians.
The group produce and book most of their own shows, and advertise their own events. Armed with years of experience at improv classes in Calgary, Danylo found success with the troupe first in Australia but even more so in Canada and the US.
“Australia was certainly [an] eye opener, so we started trying places in Canada,” he says. “It was in Fort McMurray, one of our first shows. It was a 600-seat theatre, and the reaction was like, you know, a jet engine of noise coming back at us, with cheers and stuff. We were not used to that at the time.”
To Danylo, even bad performances are great performances.
“Even when it goes poorly, it’s kind of funny,” he says. “It’s funny on how little sense it’s currently making to any of us on stage. But then, you’re also looking into your friends’ eyes and you each know when it’s not going well. So, at least there’s that camaraderie, that you’re in it together.”
Although Danylo came up with the idea for the show, the others all contribute equally. The show features choreographed dancing and running that plays into the theme of a bunch of fake strippers whose best-before date may have passed trying improv comedy for the first time. These men, all in their 50s, take it off and shake it off, in the most hilarious way possible.
“My wife had just come back from a real stripper show, Thunder from Down Under or something like that, and she said it was packed. I said, ‘Well, we have torsos; we could do that.’ I was sitting in the bath [thinking] it was a perfect combination of energy. It’s a show you can parody, that no one’s ever… People have done sketches of male strippers, but nobody had ever done a full-length parody of them.”
The Comic Strippers
8 pm Saturday, October 15
$53, McPherson Playhouse
rmts.bc.ca