Ottawa Fringe: GofundYourself: reliance on audience leaves comedy flat

A production by the improv group Black Box Comedy, the premise of GoFundYourself is promising enough. The show, directed by Chris Hannay and Dani Alon, begins with performer asking an audience member what their big dream is; this dream will then be the goal that both the performers and spectators will try to raise funds for that particular evening, in a telethon style format. The catch is that instead of financial donations, the funds will take the form of laughs elicited from the audience by the various sketches enacted.

Since the show is based almost entirely on improv in reaction to word prompts from spectators, comedic effectiveness varies. While there were a few funny scenes the night that I went, such as a section titled ‘Archery Moms’ (a riff off the real-life ‘Dance Moms’), the task of converting audience suggestions into spontaneous and genuinely humorous quips seemed a challenging one for the performers throughout. This challenge may have been due to the relatively innocuous prompts shouted out (‘Presbyterian’ and ‘mac and cheese’ being among them), though I found the scenes which were entirely devised by the performers to be the most creative and organic. Although GoFundYourself is meant to be a performance of improv, its overall comedic potential may benefit from less reliance on constant audience prompts and more contributions from the actors themselves.

This is not to say that most spectators will be unsatisfied, as the numerous laughs garnered the night I viewed it attest to. In improv, the show onstage is driven by what one would like to see, after all—it just depends on what the performers choose to do with the suggestions.

GoFundYourself continues until June 22 in Academic Hall as part of the Ottawa Fringe Festival. For information and tickets, see https://ottawafringe.com/shows/gofundyourself/