Jonestown: Guinea Pigs | Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

Jonestown: Guinea Pigs

Note: This review is from 2015

Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

They are better known as a ventriloquist and a a magician respectively – but Guinea Pigs is likely to change all that. For here Sarah Jones and magician Nicholas Johnson serve up a bold, quirky and funny take on the sketch show that firmly establishes their comedy credentials.

Collectively known as Jonestown, the duo have set almost all the action in a mysterious psychological testing station, where they awake in a locked room. The sinister unseen voice of the robot super-intelligence behind this facility subjects them to such frequently cited, if ethically dubious, tests as the Sanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Obedience Experiment… as well as a few outrageous ones of its own devising that are less likely to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed papers.

Jones and Johnson have clearly been reading their pop-science books (or Wikipedia, at least), although the results of their scenes may vary from what the academics predict. As they try to figure out a means of escape, the dynamic between them is fairly classic; Johnson dumb but keen, Jones the nominative straightwoman – although put the prospect of a marshmallow in front of her, and the roles quickly reverse.

Essentially, then, it’s a show that sounds intelligent, but is executed stupidly, which in turn requires a concealed comic smartness to pull off. That’s a quietly impressive feat.

The tongue-in-cheek sci-fi/mystery elements, combined with their playful on-stage characters, give the show a distinctive, silly personality, which often proves so elusive for sketch comedy. Scenes from the cell are interspersed with flashbacks charting the duo’s shared back-story through high school and uni, which incorporates a few good-natured elements of audience participation, but nothing to alarm even the most terminally shy.

Suspension of disbelief is frequently undermined by their knowing, meta-references to what’s going on, but they strike the right balance between getting laughs from acknowledging the low-tech staging and driving forward a convincing-enough story.

En route they deploy mimes, pacy montages, pop-culture references galore and, to engineer an unlikely conclusion to the narrative, a classy set-piece on the screen behind them. Although it is something of a distraction that a blank screen hangs there for 50 minutes without being deployed. Production note: Either hide it or project something on it in the meantime.

And the surreal conclusion is a little unsatisfying given the strength of the artifice they’d stuck with up to that point but not fatally so. The scientific conclusion of all those experiments is that Jonestown are a playful, smart and creative duo on the up.

Review date: 12 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival

We see you are using AdBlocker software. Chortle relies on advertisers to fund this website so it’s free for you, so we would ask that you disable it for this site. Our ads are non-intrusive and relevant. Help keep Chortle viable.