(Saturday night performance; there’s one show left, 8 p.m. tonight—Sunday the 23rd—at Lyric Hall)
- Tony Juliano sounds exactly like Tony Bennett. Oh, he’s lip-synching. And he looks exactly like a knife-wielding maniac. Oh, he’s acting.
- “It’s not easy to tape an egg to your forehead.”’Coney Island Chris. Or to smash it with a sledgehammer while resting on a bed of nails. Something should let Coney Island Chris do an entire show in town by himself.
- “They just stopped making this particular size of horseshoe. Can you believe that?”—Chris “Wonder” Schoeck. What will this ingratiating bend now. As he said himself, “no strong man show is complete without bending a horseshoe.” Schoeck has a lovely matter-of-fact patter, like a nice guy you’d meet in a bar. Just don’t con in a card game; he rips decks of cards in half—and quarters—for fun.
- Marlow’s accompanist really wasn’t the famed I.P. Daily, author of Yellow River. He’s Chris Kibbe. His put-down banter with the red-wigged former Vegas lounge entertainer played like an old Sonny & Cher variety show.
- The cartoons Don Herzfeldt made in the late 1990s have aged extremely well into the current age of bad taste. “Bobby’s Balloon” had them dying in the aisles as infants dropped from the heavens.
- If Nicholas Ridiculous happens to go insane and gets suspended from an aerial hoop in an old-fashioned straitjacket, he’ll hardly be inconvenienced.
- New Haven looks pretty cool in cartoon form, as rendered in KR47’s Shaun of the Dead-esque Zombie Apocalypse. According to the cartoon, there are zombie whores to be had in the New Haven vicinity.
- Amazing Amy has a new email address. After a completely silent contortionist routine which she says derives from the “astounding power of yoga,” Amy suddenly got amazingly loquacious, kind of killing the full-cast curtain call.
- The fire-eating, fire-juggling and fire-hula-hooping finale was so casual and low-key you felt you were part of a private club in which people could hang around and be themselves, even if that meant open flames and painful pranks. Even the cartoons, most of which you can easily find online and enjoy in the privacy of your home, felt better when shared with an crowd of fellow sickniks.
10. There was much more to marvel at. Hopefully enough to hold the faithful for another year.