Melbourne International Comedy Festival review by Steve Bennett

They are better known as a ventriloquist and a a magician respectively – but Guinea Pigs is likely to change all that. For here Sarah Jones and magician Nicholas Johnson serve up a bold, quirky and funny take on the sketch show that firmly establishes their comedy credentials.

Collectively known as Jonestown, the duo have set almost all the action in a mysterious psychological testing station, where they awake in a locked room. The sinister unseen voice of the robot super-intelligence behind this facility subjects them to such frequently cited, if ethically dubious, tests as the Sanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Obedience Experiment… as well as a few outrageous ones of its own devising that are less likely to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed papers.

Jones and Johnson have clearly been reading their pop-science books (or Wikipedia, at least), although the results of their scenes may vary from what the academics predict. As they try to figure out a means of escape, the dynamic between them is fairly classic; Johnson dumb but keen, Jones the nominative straightwoman – although put the prospect of a marshmallow in front of her, and the roles quickly reverse.

Essentially, then, it’s a show that sounds intelligent, but is executed stupidly, which in turn requires a concealed comic smartness to pull off. That’s a quietly impressive feat.

The tongue-in-cheek sci-fi/mystery elements, combined with their playful on-stage characters, give the show a distinctive, silly personality, which often proves so elusive for sketch comedy. Scenes from the cell are interspersed with flashbacks charting the duo’s shared back-story through high school and uni, which incorporates a few good-natured elements of audience participation, but nothing to alarm even the most terminally shy.

Suspension of disbelief is frequently undermined by their knowing, meta-references to what’s going on, but they strike the right balance between getting laughs from acknowledging the low-tech staging and driving forward a convincing-enough story.

En route they deploy mimes, pacy montages, pop-culture references galore and, to engineer an unlikely conclusion to the narrative, a classy set-piece on the screen behind them. Although it is something of a distraction that a blank screen hangs there for 50 minutes without being deployed. Production note: Either hide it or project something on it in the meantime.

And the surreal conclusion is a little unsatisfying given the strength of the artifice they’d stuck with up to that point but not fatally so. The scientific conclusion of all those experiments is that Jonestown are a playful, smart and creative duo on the up.

Review date: 12 Apr 2015
Reviewed by: Steve Bennett
Reviewed at: Melbourne International Comedy Festival