AWOK gets its audiences laughing, and critics and other notables have taken note! Here’s a sampling of some kind words and reviews:
“A Week Of Kindness stands out as a group that breaks the mold and really innovates, in both its video and live sketches. Their show is really something new.”
-Jeff Rubin, Assistant Editor, CollegeHumor.com
“These guys start with awesome, original ideas and then take them in hilarious, original directions- if you don’t laugh, I’ll eat everything this blurb is printed on.”
-Jim Jazwiecki, VH1’s Best Week Ever.tv
“A Week of Kindness is one of the more riotously funny new sketch groups out there. Their videos… are nothing short of brilliant.”
-Jeff Bercovici, Woman’s Wear Daily (wwd.com)
“…like child geniuses in medical school.”
-Shayna Ferm, founding member, Fearsome
“If you don’t think nature footage is 50 times better when it’s remixed as a musical, you are dead fucking wrong my friend.”
-gorillamask.com 03/27/06, commenting on “Nature Footage: The Musical.”
Nytheatre.com reviewed our 2006 summer show at the Peoples Improv theatre, and they loved it!:
nytheatre.com review
Kyle Ancowitz · July 18, 2006
Dances With Wolfshirts, the latest sketch comedy offering from the three-man troupe A Week of Kindness, is a spirited, scabrous, and totally beside-the-point exploration of the post-capitalist trend cycle. Mike Still, Nate Kushner, and Dan Hopper have conceived and perform their fifth show as an amusingly unenlightening tribute to our restless consumerist whims and they handily succeed in being very funny.
Fans of sketch classics like Mr. Show with Bob and David, The State, or even good ol’ Saturday Night Live should feel right at home with A Week of Kindness’s blend of antic live skits punctuated with (what they describe as) “innovative, often-demented short films.” The satirical video interludes, including mock commercials, music videos, and sketches within sketches, do a lot of the grunt work in solidifying the show’s theme, but whether you’ll agree that they’re “innovative” depends on how much TV you watch. Who cares? The videos are frequently hilarious.
Meanwhile, the blithely illogical sketches don’t always have punchlines, but inevitably showcase AWOK’s wide-ranging and capricious comic imaginations. The inspirations for many of the sketches are long-forgotten trends and other occult artifacts from our own pop culture. ’50s pop music, cartoon bears, role-playing games, “brainstamps” (remember them?), and the kitschy t-shirts with airbrushed wolf graphics that give the show its title are funny merely because they may once have been absorbing and now clearly are not. The show’s only thread of narrative is supplied by a singing redneck who relates an implausible story of a time when wolfshirts were all the rage. As you might imagine, that fictional trend ended as soon as it began, but I have to confess that I left the theatre wondering if I could bid for wolfshirts on eBay. They must have gotten those props somewhere.
Probably the funniest moment came when Weekster Nate Kushner ate a huge ball of lint stuck to a glazed donut and added unexpected texture to a sketch about Helen Keller, which was otherwise so absurdist as to be literally absurd. This is the level they’re operating on. I hope it was intentional and, if not, I hope they keep it.
Apart from the insight that some trends originate in Williamsburg (which, for our out-of-town readers, is a hipster enclave in Brooklyn where AWOK has sometimes performed), there isn’t much depth in their analysis of the origin and demise of fads. But seriously, no one in the audience was there for a lecture in sociology. The point is that the hour-long Dances With Wolfshirts was full of enough coarse, sexist, race-baiting, potty mouth, hoo-ha nonsense (plus songs) to make me laugh until I veered into the seating aisle.
Also, check out what offoffonline had to say about our summer 2006 show:
Oh, That’s Sketchy
by Doug Strassler
A Week of Kindness: Dances With Wolfshirts reviewed August 8, 2006
Penn Station isn’t the only place in west Midtown witnessing a flurry of activity. Consider the People’s Improv Theater, just a few blocks south. This upstart has risen very quickly to rival the Upright Citizens Brigade as a major source of edgy sketch comedy.
Take, for example, Dances With Wolfshirts, the fifth show from sketch group A Week of Kindness. Week consists of the well-oiled team of Dan Hopper, Nate Kushner, and Mike Still, performing live and in several previously filmed skits as they mock consumerism, a subject ripe for teasing.
In fact, the group itself bills the show as a “multimedia blend of high-energy, high-wit live performance and innovative, often demented short films” exploring “the lifecycle of trends, immersing the audience in a world of soup addicts, frivolous surgery, and, of course, lots of awesome T-shirts with huge wolves on them.” (They do all this with a little help from some friends and fellow comedians, such as Chris O’Connor and Becky Yamamoto.) The source of the show’s title is a made-up trend—shirts featuring the faces of wolves—that the trio pretends is the latest fad.
The humor, as anyone knows who has seen them perform, is quite irreverent. For instance, there’s the aforementioned soup sketch, played as though it were an afterthought that became a sketch in itself. The subject is one sketch member’s addiction to soup and his attempts to wean himself off it. Like the Seinfeld cast, Hopper, Kushner, and Still know how to carry off a scene, turning nothing into something.
Their timing is also impeccable. They can pace a scene so that they take the joke out just far enough, without it dying on them and the audience. (Hopper, in particular, offers some priceless double takes and line readings.) Given that the sketches are written and rehearsed in advance, the show is quite well paced; it’s a shame they couldn’t have added another 10 or 15 minutes’ worth of material.
One funny scene has a member of the group bringing home a girlfriend to meet his father. The girlfriend turns out to be Helen Keller, who, disabilities aside, is quite the chatterbox, inviting “herself” to feast on a rather disgusting glazed doughnut. Another highlight finds the members of Kindness and some additional cast members in a video sending up the montage in the film Magnolia where the characters sing Aimee Mann’s song “Wise Up.” Each of the three performers has an amazing presence, with the perfect combination of disciplined rehearsal and agility on one’s feet.
The jokes in Wolfshirts meander; they are not predictable and do not follow any standard setup. Occasionally, there isn’t even a punch line; the scene just goes black, and then the audience laughs. It takes a few seconds for the sketch’s humor to register, but when it does, the audience laughs. And oh, how they laugh.