Nothing in comedy defines expertise quite like Chicago improvisers TJ & Dave at work. They are the OGs of longform improv, and watching them mock up a play on the hoof is, for me, about as blissful as live performance gets. They’d probably be mortified by that hype, mind you: TJ Jagodowski and Dave Pasquesi are the most modest twosome, setting about their extemporised business with none of the nervous energy or look-at-me theatrics sometimes (and sometimes unfairly) associated with their art form.
Even the usual ritual of soliciting suggestions from the audience is dispensed with. The pair just set their ball rolling, picking up cues from wherever they find themselves on stage, letting one inference lead to the next, one idea blossom into another compelling scene. As tonight’s scenario emerges (a bachelor party of three assembles at a lapdancing club), the duo seem more interested in character than jokes, less focused on eye-catching effect than on the little details that build a picture of where and who they are, and why it might matter.
All of which only intensifies the comedy. Jagodowski’s bluff dad character (a role that, like all the others, soon passes back and forth between both performers) is an endless fount of funny as he obsesses about the strip joint’s logistical engineering and drops gormless one-liners (“if I could fill a swimming pool with something other than water, it’d be socks”) in all directions. Pasquesi’s tripping best man is meted out in small, choice doses, just a dopey cameo – until he emerges as the bearer of our story’s surreptitious emotional burden, a rabbit staring into the headlights of a bachelor’s life without his now-married best friend.
Maybe we don’t get a fully rounded story; it stops rather than ends. But that feels true to TJ & Dave’s unshowy manner. It’s not about crescendo and catharsis, it’s about regular lives unfolding: stuff happening, most of it amusing, some of it surprisingly meaningful, and all of it plucked by the two veterans out of absolutely nowhere. The show is virtuosic without remotely advertising itself as such, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
At Soho Theatre, London, until 9 September.
