'Comforting but grotesque'

Creepy Boys pick their comedy favourites

Queer Canadian performance comedy duo Creepy Boys – aka Sam Kruger and S.E. Grummett (Grumms) – are heading back to the UK to perform their Edinburgh Comedy Award nominated show Slugs in London and Bristol from next week. Here they share their Perfect Playlist of comedy favourites.

Wet Pets San Pablo

Where to begin with Wet Pets? A jingle both wildly more catchy and expansive than it ever needed to be. A quality we both aspire to across all work we do. A song that begins and truly thrusts you into its world with an absolute certainty that it needs not be over-explained.

It was one of the key vocal stims for us both, during the writing process of SLUGS, and encapsulates a kind of silly nonsense applied with an uncalled-for thoroughness to the assignment, that we both deeply connect to.

(For additional context: we live in a country that has easy access to legal, cheap, and high-quality cannabis products, and this video in particular, pairs well with 2.5mg of Blue Razzberry Shredums, and a bowl of frozen blueberries that will slowly turn your fingers and mouth black like a zombie’s throughout the course of an evening).

Teddy Has An Operation

Grumms showed this to a girl they went on a date with one time and let’s just say, there was not a second date.

Mysterious and alluring, comforting but grotesque, Teddy Has An Operation is a must-watch. A video both deeply funny, but poetic and simple. We’ve come back to this video many, many times over the last few years as inspiration to different projects.

Viagra Boys: Sports

When we were writing music for SLUGS, Viagra Boys, especially this song, was a big inspiration. We knew we wanted to write lyrics as stupid as ‘Baseball. Basketball. Wiener Dog.’

Easily one of our fav songs to put on and walk around our grubby little town as grubby little dudes. It really just captures something we love about being gross, prairie dirtbags.

Sam’s pick: Pen15

There is a certain intense physicality to Maya Erskine in Pen15, a criminally underwatched series, which we not so much absorbed as tried to summon within ourselves while making our first show Creepy Boys, where we played a pair of occult curious twins.

She is unhinged, tragic, desperate, and a beautiful idiot all within a few minutes. The show as a whole really embodies how self-serious and crazy being a pre-pubescent teen is while also finding space to depict the genuine beauty and tragedy of that age.

Grumms’ pick: Jackass

I remember as a kid growing up in Canada, once all the snow melted at the end of winter, we’d go out and have to pick up all the dog turds in the yard. Six months worth. My dad used to bet my brother and I that he’d buy us each a Slurpee if we stuck our head in the bag of defrosting dog shit for 10 seconds.

I didn’t realise how much Jackass was an influence on me until a friend of mine recently reintroduced me to it. It’s a really interesting snapshot of late 1990s/early 2000s fuck-around-and-find-out attitudes. Plus, if you watch it through a queer lens, it’s really a show about male intimacy - how they can only be intimate with each others’ bodies through pranks: shoving toy cars up each others’ bums, dressing up your penis as a mouse and letting a snake bite it, generally putting yourself in physical danger right next to your friends. Truly incredible.

Shirley Gnome

One of Canada’s premiere musical comedians Shirley Gnome is an absolute powerhouse and silly goose. A power goose of silly proportions. Her newest special really is a full throated recommendation for us. The first song Body Sexual Body really shows off the whole Shirley package: the vocals, production, and a silly yet darkly unhinged sensibility.

Shirley was also our musician doula for Slugs - we came to her with a heap of song pieces: beats, synth lines, voice memos and, half finished lyrics. Shirley plunged her confident hands in, and through all the kicking and screaming, pulled out SONGS (so many songs).