Beatboxer Beardyman & Ari Shaffir
"The soul is the seat of all the sounds"
Beardyman
What is Beardyman doing at a comedy festival? He’s billed as a beatboxer, performs with a sophisticated DJ set-up, plays at music festivals. So how did he fill Montreal’s Theatre St. Denis at last year’s Just For Laughs Festival?
For starters, he’s funny. And absolutely entertaining. In one 10 minute conversation he caws like a crow, makes bird sounds that morph into R2D2-ish chirps, talks like a California valley girl, then brings his voice down from a high-pitched cat’s meow to a deep, bass-baritone drawl, like a tired old cow. “Did you know,” he says, “that if you speed up a cow it becomes a cat?”
He’ll move from his British twang to an accent-less movie-announcer voice à la Don LaFontaine, soften it up to James Mason voice, dip down to Barry White, morph back into beatboxing, and then talk as if his voice is on a badly warped tape. “I never really know what I’m going to do,” he says, “until I get up on stage.”
He encourages me to try it, to find the sound effects deep inside me. “The soul,” he says, like a comedy guru, “is the seat of all the sounds.” He bares his soul tonight in Beardyman Unshaved at l’Astral.
Ari Shaffir
Ari Shaffir graduated from college but didn’t want to work, so he became a comedian. “It’s all I love doin’ in life,” he says. He’s appearing in a handful of shows, from The Nasty Show to the one he put together, a night of sex stories titled “So, I’m F**king This Girl, Right?” I’m gobsmacked to learn that he was born an Orthodox Jew. But a few years ago he “came out” to his parents as an atheist with comedic aspirations. He’d been studying at Yeshiva University in New York, when he realized that he doesn’t believe in God. Off came the forelocks, off came the yarmulke, “and out came the filth.”
“So, I’m F**king This Girl, Right?” is being staged at a legendary Montreal strip club called Cleopatra. His parents have actually seen his shows. They say they love that he makes people laugh. And they assume the stories he tells are just jokes. “I try to book as many shows on Friday nights,” he says, “so they can’t come.”
Shaffir is not troubled by the anxiety of influence. Having grown up without cable (“My parents are Jewish so we never could afford, well, not that we couldn’t afford, but we never paid for cable”), he’d never watched or seen stand-up comedians until he decided to be one. Now he’s the complete opposite of what his parents would have wanted him to be. Take his writing process, for instance. “I get high,” he explains, “and then I sometimes drive around, or sometimes just sit around in my car and I just think of weird stuff.” The real development, he says, happens on stage. See it all come together over the next few days at Cleopatra.
Ari Shaffir
Beardyman
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