Ho Ho Ho It's Horatio
Sanz! Live from the
UCB Theatre, he delivers a Christmas show with the twisted sensibility
now missing from Saturday Night Live
This
past week, former longtime Saturday Night Live cast member Horatio Sanz
brought his oddly and delightfully twisted sensibility to take on
variety shows and perhaps even his former employer with a truly unhinged
collection of skits and performers.
How twisted, you may ask. A few bits: Sanz’s “mom” appears urging him to
keep it clean and “don’t make fun of Jesus, for fuck’s sake!”; Sanz’s
co-host, Brett Gelman, relates a list of all the improbable terrible
things that happened to him in the past year: his dad confessed to
murdering Jon Benet, for his birthday he got a cake made of pig shit,
etc.; and the capper being Sanz as Santa buying a gun to kill Mrs. Claus
out of jealous rage.
Gelman and other guests in the show make an indelible impression, namely
Edgar Oliver (don’t know where he came from and when we find out, we
might need to warn the neighborhood children) reading a pedophilic poem
so outrageous and progressively more disgusting that everyone in the
audience squirmed in their seats, actually physically nauseated by the
end of it.
In a puppet show presented by “Will Stinson’s Fuzzy Buddies,” UCB
theater regular and teacher Michael Delaney emerged from behind the
curtain as a teddy bear who delivers a rant escalating in anger about
his brother having to serve in Iraq, with Sanz trying to calm him down.
In the same sketch, Gelman played Frank Oz as being unable to stop
reminiscing about Jim Henson, which also sets Delaney off.
Unrelated to the comedy, musical guest David Bazan played two grittily
beautiful Christmas songs and led a closing full cast rendition of John
Lennon’s “Happy Christmas,” complete with Oliver in the background
fondling one of the elves. Anyway, Bazan is the kind of musical guest
SNL used to book in the 1970s (like Kinky Friedman) rather than its
current parade of less substantial popular performers.
The capper of all cappers in the show, which best showcased Sanz, was a
skit where he played serial killer John Wayne Gacy and punk rocker G.G.
Allin sharing their last Christmas together before Gacy is executed and
Allin overdosed. The conceit was Gacy being friendly and seemingly
normal, but then the stage goes dark and Sanz puts a red light under his
face and reveals Gacy’s true evil thoughts -- actually a little
dramatically scary, rather than just funny, making the performance all
the more effective.
As you can no doubt see by this recounting at length of everything Sanz
packed into 45 to 60 minutes, if you missed this show at UCB December 20
and 21 (there were two performances each night), you truly missed a
hilarious one. |