Live Bex Show and Sad Fucks | Comedy Review

Connor O'Malley in Sad Fucks

After watching Live Bex Show and Sad Fucks, two new solo sketch shows starring Rebecca Sohn and Connor O'Malley respectively and happening Sundays at 8pm through May 27 at the Annoyance Theatre, it's still hard to say who the bigger weirdo is. Maybe O'Malley by a hair?

In Sad Fucks, O'Malley assualts us with an array of rapid-fire losers. We see a mulleted high-school drop out chucking beer cans against the home of the principal who denied him a diploma some 13 years ago for punching the school librarian just hours before graduation. He's an outrageous character, although O'Malley employs him in a number of recurring scenes that never quite gel. Instead, we laugh harder at O'Malley's scene about a douchebag who mistakes his girlfriend's raging flu as sexual advances and we also meet Ted Blaze, a D-lister who teaches the art of writing script treatments for motion pictures who has shameless contempt for his students and name drops celebrities like Tony Shalhoub. (O'Malley actually takes a moment in this scene to improvise with the audience, which is something we don't often see in solo shows.) As Professor Penny Pincher, O'Malley breaks character and delivers the saddest fuck of all, himself as a struggling comedian with a borderline pornography addiction and a father who's convinced he's gay. Hilarious.

Rebecca Sohn delivers fewer scenes, but longer ones in Live Bex Show. Her 22-year-old chief of police, a hot cop named Satin Pillows, takes plenty of sharp and biting digs at Hollywood in the show's hilarious opening. Unfortunately, neither her redneck advice columnist nor her charlatan psychic quite hit. But watch for a scene in which she recreates a monologue from a fake 1904 silent film called "Sunshine Can Blind You." Its absurd premise leads Sohn to a number of highly physical comic maneuvers that had me in stitches. It might be my favorite sketch scene so far this year. Likewise, her letter to an unborn child was unexpected and full of harsh truths, even if it wasn't particularly gut-busting. In both Sad Fucks and Live Bex Show we get high-stakes nuttiness from two competent and intelligent comedians. I'm not going to complain about that.