Letterkenny Presents a Night of Stand Up at The Fitzgerald Theater (02-23-2024)

Downtown St. Paul was treated to a night of comedy from its neighbors to the North or as the comedic duo of Bob and Doug McKenzie (Dave Thomas and Rick Moranis) once said, “The Great White North.”

I’ve never seen the Crave/Hulu series Letterkenny. So I typed the name into the nearest search engine and Bob and Doug popped up as a like-minded show. I am a fan of the SCTV comedy duo with their hilarious movie, Strange Brew and here are similarities between the two sketch comedies: Canada, flannel shirts, beer and couches. But where Bob and Doug mostly sat on a couch and ramshackled their way through a segment devoted to bottle openers, series creators of Letterkenny Jared Keeso and Jacob Tierny created a fictional rural Ontario town where the residents mostly sat around to converse with tight, fast-paced dialogue on the finer points of how to grill a steak, boating etiquette and masturbating in space.

The comics that took the stage at The Fitz were self-described ancillary characters to Letterkenny universe. Jeff McEnery opened the evening, looking around the diminutive theater with its ornate opera boxes, saying, “Muppet balconies.”

McEnery was in good humor as he joked about country music being the soundtrack to idiocy and told the crowd that he was not far removed from Alexander, the doltish character he played on Letterkenny. He confessed to getting fired from KFC two hours into his training and did a hilarious compare/contrast with a former girlfriend who was way above his pay grade, joking that her family collected pearls and his family had a lot of women named Pearl.

Allie Pearse was up next, and she didn’t waste any time saying how much she loved being on the road and using the hotels’ detachable shower heads for reasons that didn’t involve cleaning.

Allie Pearse’s relation to Letterkenny is as a writer, and what she liked best about being in the room was that anything and everything was on the table. And she brought that uncensored zest to her standup routine as she talked about topics ranging from R. Kelly and condoms to putting Plan B pills on a credit card rewards program.

“I’m kinky in theory,” she said to the crowd, adding that she was up for anything until it was going to happen. Then she remembers that she has to do her taxes.

Mark Forward (Coach on Letterkenny) was the headliner, and he had an adventurous set. Whereas McEnery and Pearse’s comedy was observational, Forward was more in the absurd tradition of Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman. That’s why he came out in a silver space suit to do an impression of a robot from the future doing standup.

From there he kept wandering on and off the stage, as if not sure if he wanted to be there, segueing into bits like reanimating dead relatives via Frosty the Snowman; doing improv as a children’s television safari host with car troubles; the difference between sad and funny: dead monkey (sad) in a tiny tuxedo (funny); and playing a song called, “Xavier McCutcheon Naming Bears.”

It was all tomfoolery and what made it all great was the puzzlement of the crowd on how to react, which Martin and Kaufman would say might be the whole point.