Comedy review: Blueberries Are Assholes finds the absurd within the ordinary, at the Firehall Arts Centre
TJ Dawe’s hilarious one-man show will have you looking at just about everything in a different way
TJ Dawe
The Firehall Arts Centre presents Blueberries Are Assholes until October 30
YOU KNOW WHAT’S really weird? Just about everything. That’s the conclusion you will likely take away from TJ Dawe’s current one-man show. Pitched somewhere between a standup set and a TED Talk, Blueberries Are Assholes finds the local theatre-scene veteran exploring the inherent absurdity of things we tend to take for granted, including (in no particular order) the English language, our collective addiction to caffeine, sleeping and dreaming, the human tongue, and breakfast. And blueberries, of course.
It all starts, though, with Power Girl’s boobs.
A brief explainer for those not steeped in DC Comics lore: Power Girl is an alternate-world version of Supergirl. Like Supergirl (and her cousin, Superman), Power Girl has extraordinary strength and the ability to fly. Unlike Supergirl, she is invariably depicted as having massive breasts. (The back story there, according to writer Jimmy Palmiotti: "Okay. When the character was created, Wally Wood was the artist that drew Power Girl, and he was convinced that the editors were not paying attention to anything he did. So, his inker said ‘Every issue, I’m going to draw the tits bigger until they notice it.’ It took about seven or eight issues before anyone was like, ‘Hey, what’s with the tits?’ And that’s where they stopped. True story.")
Dawe finds it curious that, in spite of her costume—a skintight number with a cleavage-revealing hole in the top—almost no one she encounters seems to notice Power Girl’s cartoonishly ample endowments. By the same token, he says, most of us pay no mind to how many of the things we engage with on a daily basis are actually pretty odd.
Why, for instance, do we combine p and h to make an f sound, as in philosophy, when there’s a perfectly good single letter for that? And for that matter, why do we use gh for the same purpose, as in rough? Also, what’s with silent letters, the ones that just hang out in words, doing nothing but taking up space? English is pretty weird, but in some respects it has nothing on Spanish and French, in which every noun has a gender assigned to it—which, as Dawe points out, is completely arbitrary and has no particular rules for remembering which gender goes with which noun. And then there’s German…
Although it’s clear that Blueberries Are Assholes is a scripted show, Dawe convincingly delivers the material in a freewheeling, riffing style that makes audience members feel as if they are being taken on a cascading ride down his stream of consciousness.
He does it all without any sets, costumes, or props, just a man with a microphone on a bare stage. It’s all he needs. Well, that and a big white screen, which he employs for exactly 30 seconds to show a commercial that will invoke instant nostalgia in anyone who watched TV in the mid ’80s. (At the risk of spoilers, let’s just say it revolves around Sturdy Danny McGee and his 59th tree.)
On the Friday night I attended, there were less than two dozen people in the audience at the Firehall. That’s a shame, because the show is as hilarious as it is smart, and it will almost certainly make you look at just about everything, from raisins to sneezing to your morning latte—and possibly comic-book superheroes’ absurd proportions—in a different way afterwards.
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