Review: 143 – Tuomo Väliaho – Helsingin Sanomat – 26.10.2002
Laughter stops in Pasila
Stand-up club Act!one
wants to be on his stage
The best of comedians
On Saturdays, the foyer of Studio Pasila has an empty stage, a lone microphone and a bright spotlight. There are 150 people sitting around him who have paid to laugh.
A difficult setup for a stranger who would have to ski fun for 25 minutes in a row.
“Stand-up comedy is a brutal game. If you can’t tell in the first 30 seconds who you are and that you’re funny, you’re ‘dead’ – no one listens anymore”, the leader of the Act!one club
Riku Suokas sums up.
Suokas is the evening’s MC, or Master of Ceremonies, whose task is to warm up the audience and introduce the other performers of the evening, Perttu Pesä, Ilari Johansson, Rich Lyons and Jaakko Saariluoma. Suokas gets up on the bench and starts with stories that he knows will make you laugh based on his 500 performances.
According to studies, 70 percent of women imagine someone else to replace their partner when they make love. I asked my wife if you don’t do that. He says he doesn’t really have time for that.
The “stand-up virgin”, i.e. a first-timer, is confused by the opportunity. The audience shouts at the performers, and on the other hand, the comedians are constantly looking for contact with the audience.
Insults are not spared either. When a man in the front row mistakenly stumbles onto the stage, Ilari Johansson sneers about it throughout his set.
“It’s about interaction. The performance may change almost completely when talking to the audience takes you off track. The audience watches the play, it participates in stand-up,” says the professional actor Saariluoma.
“Stand-up is the maximum ‘here and now’ situation, even though the performance is scripted.”
The dress code for stand-up includes jeans and a T-shirt or sweater.
“The performer must look like an ordinary guy who has just decided to start talking. The stories must not show that they have been carefully thought out and presented hundreds of times.”
Many of the evening’s stories go under the navel.
I read somewhere that five times more money is spent on research on silicone breasts and Viagra than on Alzheimer’s disease. Will it happen that in 30 years’ time, women will have big boobs and men will be walking around with their contraptions in the ditch, but no one remembers what they are used for,” Johansson says.
“The number of low-end stories depends on the comedian. Many people don’t have them at all,” Suokas says.
“It’s also about the audience of the evening. If it likes a story, the comedian is happy to throw in more of the same. If the audience doesn’t laugh, a good performer changes the subject on the fly.”
This time, the evening’s performers are all men, so many of the stories are about the man’s life.
An advertisement for a plastic surgeon offered penis lengthening in instalments. The question arises, what happens if you don’t manage all the instalments? Is it so that one morning the doorbell rings and there are two big guys with MC Pocahontas on their vests? “Hello, the situation now is that we need seven centimetres of penis or 20 tonnes,” Saariluoma says from the stage.
During the evening, the Finnish man is constantly trying to mate. When the mating turns into marriage, the man tries to run away. A man is a genuine protozoan who should not be tamed with Body-shop products or allergy-tested shampoos.
Rich Lyons, who has lived in Finland for six years, offers another perspective in English.
When I moved from New York to Finland, I was amazed that there are so few black people here. When I first watched a Finnish basketball game on TV, I fiddled with the color adjustment knob for half an hour before I realized that the players were actually white.
Stand-up culture in Finland is young.
The first stage comedians began to test their skills in front of an audience in the early 1990s. As the director of the Hämeenlinna City Theatre, Riku Suokas founded the first permanent stand-up club in his theatre in 1996.
Club Act!one was founded in January this year and it also operates in Hämeenlinna and Tampere.
“We want to have the best comedians and that Act!one is a guarantee of quality,” says Suokas, who heads Studio Pasila.
Jaakko Saariluoma tells the last joke of the evening:
I’ve avoided getting married, I’ve been in a cohabiting relationship. It hasn’t been easy. Always at cousins’ weddings, the older aunts of the family poked me in the side and said: “You’re next.” It’s boring! They didn’t stop until I started doing the same to them at the funeral.
Judging by the resounding applause, the audience has got what they wanted. My own abdominal muscles have also gotten a commendable ride. I have to come again.