Last Call for Cleveland comedy
By John Benson
Northeast Ohio sketch- comedy troupe Last Call Cleveland is hoping to exorcise some local demons with its new show, “Lake Erie Time Machine,” which appears Friday and Saturday at PlayhouseSquare’s 14th Street Theatre.
“We don’t usually have a theme, but with the Playhouse-Square shows, we kind of put in a whole story line to make it more fun,” said Aaron McBride, 37, an Ashland native who now calls Cleveland home. “We have a bunch of random four- or five-minute-long sketches. We have a ‘Charlie’s Angels’ things going on where [Cleveland Mayor] Frank Jackson calls us up and gives us a job to do. He’s having us go back in time and fix some of Cleveland’s mistakes through the years hoping it’ll make things better instead of just poking fun at our city.”
Among the forgettable history being tackled in the live show are Michael Jordan’s “The Shot” and, predictably, the Cuyahoga River catching on fire. The irony is these topics are highly clich d, yet Last Call Cleveland — McBride, Newton Falls native Mike Polk, Mark McKenzie and Matt Zitelli — has made its name by goofing on, well, clich s.
Formed in 2001 as a cable-access show on the Kent State University campus, Last Call Cleveland received national attention for its “Man in the Box” Web series. Then the ante was upped with the viral sensation “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video” shorts. The quartet’s latest YouTube hit is “Huge Group of Girls,” which has received around 400,000 views.
The funny clip makes fun of the ladies-night-out concept, detailing the predictable roles — the drunkest, the girl who is easy, the bored cousin — found in a large group of ladies hitting a club.
“We love to make fun of sort of clich s; we pick up on that pretty well,” McBride said. “Like we have the ‘Dueling Stand-up Comedians’ sketch where it’s two guys doing stand-up, and it’s overlapping because there are so many clich s with stand-up comedy. And then we have a sketch called ‘Four Uncles’ where it’s like we play our uncles, and we’re just saying a bunch of things that uncles do. The ‘Huge Group of Girls’ falls in that. It’s something we noticed and we try to exploit to the best of our ability.”
The foursome’s exploits aren’t limited to just Cleveland. In fact, the act performed in Philadelphia last fall and Los Angeles last summer. It regularly makes trips to Chicago and New York City. The latter city brings up the idea of one day Last Call Cleveland packing up and moving to a bigger metropolis in hopes of garnering national media attention.
After watching the troupe’s numerous clips online, the notion of “Huge Group of Girls” airing on “Saturday Night Live” doesn’t seem like such a stretch.
“Our goal is to have our own thing,” McBride said. “We’re older, and I don’t know if we’re hip for ‘Saturday Night Live.’ We’d love to have our own show and do our own thing. But ultimately, we just love being around Cleveland. We just really enjoy living here. Those other cities are usually a little taxing for us Clevelanders, at least for us.”