Creepy Boys on making audience members laugh: ‘Comedy is a Trojan horse’
Still dazed from last year’s critically acclaimed run, Creepy Boys are back at the Fringe for a reprise of Edinburgh Comedy Award-nominated Slugs and a politically germane work-in-progress show. Kevin Fullerton speaks to the duo about a wild year, their status as outsiders and betting it all on creative freedom
‘Everything that happened at the Festival felt like a wave that crashed into us and kept going.’ That was the experience of SE Grummett and Sam Kruger, the duo behind Canadian absurdist queer theatre duo Creepy Boys, as they took their latest bag of ideas, Slugs, to last year’s Fringe. ‘We’d done a few preview shows in Canada,’ says Grummett, ‘but we were walking into Edinburgh like, “is this anything? Is this a mess? Does it make any sense?”’
‘We sometimes call it the darkness of the creative soul,’ agrees Kruger, ‘where you’re just lost and you’ve gone through too much, and it’s not fun to you anymore. And so we weirdly tumbled into everything.’ The ‘everything’ in question was a wellspring of positive acclaim from critics and audiences alike, who loved the group’s frenetic multimedia creativity, featuring Joni Mitchell puppetry, masticating slugs, songs about garbanzo beans and costuming that would make Vince Noir salivate. Word of mouth soon spread to the judges of the Edinburgh Comedy Awards, who deigned to place Slugs’ outré spectacle on their shortlist of nominees.
Speaking via video call, the effusive duo (who radiate the positive gleam of a couple who seem perfectly matched in both personality and creative sensibility) still seem grateful but puzzled by the nomination. ‘It was strange,’ recalls Kruger, ‘It was like stand-up, stand-up, stand-up, stand-up, stand-up, stand-up and us, and we’re there with our little Dollarama blow-up shirts.’
‘But also, everybody’s there with their agents, and then there’s just us,’ remembers Grummett. ‘We’re so new to this that we don’t have agents in the market who’ll strategise for us. We’re just two guys from Canada. It was such a wild ride and it still feels surreal, like it didn’t happen.’
The broad welcome of the British comedy establishment is perhaps more of a surprise because, despite Slugs’ high gag rate and leftfield humour, Creepy Boys remain steadfastly difficult to pigeonhole. ‘We are a little bit too theatre for the comedy scene and a little bit too comedy for the theatre scene, and queer but not in a cool way,’ claims Grummett. ‘We’ve always been outsiders to things like awards, so I’m really excited to come back this year and see how that recognition actually comes to fruition.’
Their return to the Fringe will be a victory lap of sorts, with a reprise of Slugs as well as a work-in-progress called Nude Parade, a solo show from Grummett (with behind-the-scenes contributions and sound design from Kruger) about the contemporary obsession, fetishisation and commodification of trans bodies. Their punk aesthetic, one that’s breathing the air of Valerie Solanas as much as Gaulier clowning, looks unlikely to dim because awards judges might be in the room, particularly in an era grown increasingly hostile to the queer experience.
‘Comedy is a Trojan horse. It’s the way of getting an audience laughing, laughing, laughing, and then it’s a way of disarming so you can go deeper,’ says Grummett. ‘My favourite type of work that I see and make is like, if I didn’t laugh I’d cry. I mean, we have to laugh at the absurdity of the world that we’re living in right now.’
Creepy Boys: Slugs, 6–17 August, 10.40pm; Nude Parade, 19–24 August, 10.40pm; both shows at Summerhall; picture: Bokah Media.