Piscapo's Arm Shows Promise

'Sco-silly: Piscapo's Arm performed impressive, original sketches last weekend. (photo by Claire-Helene Mershon)

Last week, Friday and Saturday nights found the 'Sco bereft of either pop (damn!) or eighties music (yay!), for one purpose and one purpose only: the sketch comedy of Piscapo's Arm. Each night, the audience were subjected to two hours of good writing, solid performances and the kickass piano playing of Alec Leshy.

Piscapo's Arm is the only sketch comedy group on campus with eight members, two special guests and one musical entertainer (at least for this run of performances). They write their own material; the sketches used on these nights were of reasonably high quality. The endings of several sketches were weak and some skits were too long, but overall, they had intriguing premises and great dialogue. Particularly well-written ones were "The Big Three," an Odd Couple-esque sitcom with FDR, Winston Churchhill and Stalin sharing an apartment, and "Moral Dilemma," a skit featuring Jeremy Carlson as a redneck Conscience and Kitzie Winship as a prudish Lust. Alec Leshy's musical interlude with Duncan Gale and Aaron Mucciolo singing 1940's standards, while not an actual skit, was another highlight of the performance.

Standouts included Carlson, with a singularly chipper depiction of Hitler that was both hysterical and disturbing, Mucciolo and Mike Connor, whose Frenchman in the final skit got possibly the most comedic mileage out of the word "crepe" in recorded history.

Unfortunately, Piscapo's Arm did nothing to dispel the notion that sketch comedy is a boy's game. The two women in the cast were underused and often relegated to straight roles or flat characters. The company actually called attention to this in a piece that joked about the troupe's retention rate for female performers, but following with skits that had women ripping their shirts open and being cast as the ubiquitous girlfriend-in-vinyl-tube-top, the "feminist" humor turned from societal to gallows.

Piscapo's Arm is an extremely talented group with the potential to do outstanding comedy work. With solid endings, some tightening of their scenes, and especially with gender equity in the number and quality of roles for women, the group could become even better.