The Cody Rivers Show Presents: Stick to Glue

by Phillip Andrew Bennett Low • August 4, 2008 • This is one of those groups that all of my colleagues have been jostling me to go see for years. I finally caught them this time around. They didn't disappoint -- this is great stuff, solidly funny throughout, and it's a guaranteed hour of entertainment at the Fringe.

Womb With a View is the blog of Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, one of five bloggers covering the Minnesota Fringe Festival for the Daily Planet.

I will confess that I'm a bit baffled at everyone's praise -- they laud this show as being incredibly innovative, re-inventing comedy, doing things that have never been seen before -- whereas what I enjoy about the show is the fact that it's so solidly traditional, well in the tradition of about a thousand other comedy teams that they invite comparison to. Their sketches are built on the same kind of rapid-fire logical fallacies that drove the Marx Brothers, bridged by the same abrupt, surreal transitions used by Monty Python, informed by the same boyish befuddlement of Kids in the Hall. The point isn't that they're doing anything particularly new, because they're not. The point is that they're doing it phenomenally *well* -- so well that it seems incredibly fresh and innovative. And that's pretty high goddamn praise. Phillip Andrew Bennett Low (maximumverbosityonline@gmail.com) is a playwright and poet, storyteller and mime, theatre critic and libertarian activist, who lurks ominously in the desert wilds of St. Louis Park, feasting upon the hygienically-prepared flesh of the once-living. His main claim to fame is probably as co-founder of the Rockstar Storytellers, and as founder/producer of Maximum Verbosity, a garage-band-like theatre troupe that is in a state of constantly re-defining itself.