“Think you know clowns? Watch ‘Mump & Smoot’ and think again”
by Anna Rudge

Mump (Michael Kennard) and Smoot (John Turner) are two clowns who hail from the Ummo universe and speak Ummonian. In EXIT they find themselves trapped in purgatory where they run into some pretty spooky shenanigans.

Created by Kennard and Turner, the two clowns have been headlining shows since the 1980s. In a subversion of the stereotypical clown image, Mump and Smoot get into much darker antics than one would expect. Don’t think balloon animals and flowers squirting water, but rather dealings with the afterlife and attempted cannibalism. There’s a reason the show specifies it is not for children.

In Exit, Mump and Smoot find themselves in a sort of purgatory after discovering their own deaths, and must find a means of escape to heaven. The tone, beautifully enhanced by a surrealist set, is delightfully macabre. The clowns kept me hooked the whole time, whether they were discovering their own dead bodies or eating rats. Kennard and Turner’s ability to take such a beloved image and horrifyingly twist it for the enjoyment of an adult audience is simply marvelous.

The show is a masterclass in physical comedy. Both Kennard and Turner use elaborate gestures and emotional expressions to convey meaning to the audience. While English is sometimes thrown in with Ummonian, physicality plays a big part in storytelling. Whether they’re lugging giant bags around or re-enacting their own deaths, Mump and Smoot are always lively. Their physicality is one of the stand-out aspects of the show.

As the show progressed, Mump and Smoot realized they often needed the help of the audience. The element of audience interaction helps engagement, and is simply hilarious. You wouldn’t believe what some people come up with when put on the spot by a manic clown speaking gibberish.

Although the show is both deliciously dark and extremely funny, EXIT also manages to maintain a great emotional core. Smoot is a loveable character constantly vying for the stern Mump’s attention, and manages to invoke real emotion despite the absurdity of it all. In the end, I found I was simply rooting for their friendship to persevere.

All in all, Mump and Smoot in EXIT is a wonderfully bizarre show. Ridiculous situations, the power of friendship, and a few loose body parts, Mump and Smoot have it all!

https://thegatewayonline.ca/2024/11/performance-review-mump-smoot-in-exit/

“Mump and Smoot in Exit delightfully heartfelt comedy”
by Justin Bell

Mump and Smoot are, for the uninitiated, a pair of clowns from the planet Ummo. They worship their god, also Ummo, and speak a dialect known as Ummonian; it’s essentially gibberish with enough English words thrown in to gather what they are saying from context.

On stage, we get the clown version of the Odd Couple. Mump is the self-appointed leader of the pair, keeping them out of trouble as best he can. Smoot is slightly daft, finding trouble for the pair to fall into. Mump is, throughout, not impressed and often exhausted by the hijinks he’s being forced to endure.

Mump and Smoot are dead, to begin with, dragging in giant sacks as the show kicks off full of their body parts. They are looking at providing a final sendoff for their early remains in a terrifying afterlife scene full of skeletons, decrepit trees and a red-eyed demon statue that’s constantly trying to take over Smooth through some form of mind control.

It’s that type of absurdist humour that our lovable bumbling protagonists find themselves thrust into that Mump and Smoot are known for. The Ummoninan clowns interact with the audience, strolling through the aisles or searching for a pen to sign an important document. They don’t just break through the fourth wall; they axe it down like an over-eager firefighter on the way to the most mundane calls.

But it’s never the forced audience interaction that leaves you feeling awkward, sliding down into your seat to avoid eye contact until mean actors have moved on to a new victim. These clowns are poking fun at themselves more than anything and their gentle nature makes it fun to play along.

John Turner and Michael Kennard have honed their clowning act over almost 40 years, to the point now they can pull a laugh with a well-timed raise of an eyebrow. I laughed so hard my sides hurt, but the comedy is driven by a genuine love for these two characters.

We sympathize with the unfortunate situation that Mump and Smoot find themselves confronting. When Mump decides he’s had enough, Smoot rolls on the stage in sadness, calling out to a friend he can’t live without. It’s one of the cutest and most heartbreaking points in the show, but because it’s comedic horror we know Mump will eventually find his way back to his close friend.

They delight with brilliant stage work, hilarious puppet shows, a shadow-puppet show, and more than a few winks toward the audience, again bursting through that fourth wall. The stage crew even make an appearance, getting on Mump’s last nerve; Turner and Kennard will do almost anything to pull a laugh out of you.

While the playbill lists “Exit” as a 75-minute run time, the show comes in at a quick 60 minutes. This is a pair of professionals who know how long their charm will hold up on stage without overstaying their welcome.

Mump & Smoot in “Exit” is equal parts heartwarming and hilarious, a pair of clowns that know how to tickle your funny bone in a most terrifying, pre-Halloween event.

https://edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/review-mump-and-smoot-in-exit-delightfully-heartfelt-comedy

“The existentialists from Ummo are back: Mump and Smoot in Exit, at Theatre Network”
by Liz Nicholls

Mump and Smoot arrive, as always, from a mysterious place, through the crowd — inhabitants of another mysterious place, the theatre (that’s us!). And, as always, they’re mid-adventure, mid-conversation, en route to the stage.

It’s dark; they’re carrying lanterns. Each is chained to the heavy burlap sack they’re dragging. And we’re never quite sure whether their nightmare is us, or vice versa.

After a decade’s absence, the ‘clowns of horror’ from the planet Ummo are back among us, at Theatre Network to premiere a new show, Mump and Smoot In Exit. And it’s an original, unusual even in an archive with a notable attraction to the grotesque and the macabre.

In their collected canon, the interplanetary travellers, who speak Ummonian (a language that hints now and then at English, “Wow”, “I’m outta here”), have found themselves in locations we’ve all experienced: a tent in the wilderness, a wake, an airplane, a restaurant negotiating spaghetti…. Eruptions of blood and gore, unhinged entrails, severed limbs, rarely to be found in Trip Advisor, just happen. The familiar is a slippery slope it seems.

Anyhow, in Mump and Smoot in Exit, the latest from the prize Canadian theatre artists Michael Kennard, John Turner and director Karen Hines (whose character Pochsy is one of the country’s great creations too), they have arrived in a smoky place where none of us has been. And we’re discovering it together. There are clues, to be sure (design consultant: Andraya Diogo). It’s a landscape dominated by a skeletal tree (Beckett’s vagabonds, waiting around Godot to show up, would recognize it), full of bones and skulls, enigmatic monuments, a gargoyle with glowing red eyes. The entrance is an electrified archway of skulls. And they are not always alone there (Lauren Brady, listed in the credits as “Actor,” in full spectral get-up).

There will be a moment for Mump and Smoot when it dawns on them where they are; it’s a moment we’ve been wondering about, too. Incidentally this poses a special problem for a writer: there’s so little I can tell you about the story without spoiling it. So I’m leaving that aside, for your own good.

Mump (Kennard) is the bossier, shirtier, more aggressive one in a tuxedo jacket, with the single periscope horn. He’s the one who takes charge and gets mightily irritated when things go south. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. Smoot (Turner) is more pliable and impulsive, distracted by the audience, and ready to play. If he were to see a skull (and he does) he’d pick it up and give it a pat on the bonce. I’m pretty sure I heard “alas poor Yorick” emerging from the Ummonian phrase book. Ditto “don’t touch” from Mump. Everything that happens in In Exit is a test of this comically fraught, signature relationship.

They arrive onstage in a kind of daze, as if the show is an aftermath of something. Smoot isn’t feeling 100 per cent. Mump, who’s whispering, isn’t quite his usual confident self either; he looks oddly bewildered, then downright appalled. They are trying to remember how they got where they are. And it’s a measure of Kennard and Turner as actors in action, in detailed comic performances, that we understand, without language, an existential conundrum.

Smoot, with his chipmunk voice, is the follower, the voluble one who ingratiates himself with the audience (we go “awwww” and Mump grimaces). Mump, the skeptic, rolls his eyes; he makes of congenital exasperation an entire repertoire of reactions in Kennard’s performance. His characteristic gesture is throwing his hands up, an eloquent ‘whatever’ at moments of maximum aggro.

Victor Snaith Hernandez’s lighting is rather spectacular. And Greg Morrison’s superb original score, with its strange jagged dissonances and mad violin riffs, is in itself an aural exposition.

It’s a show unusually laden with props. And much to Mump’s chagrin (and the general hilarity in the house), they were wayward on opening night. But hey, that gave us a chance to appreciate Kennard and Turner’s skills as improvisers. For me, the more overt sequences with the audience, a group invocation to Ummo for example and a bilingual conversation soliciting individual audience members to answer a question, might be tuned up, along with the scenes involving puppet versions of the characters. So far, the seams do show a bit.

The particular genius of Mump and Smoot is the way they put the physical — no, the visceral — into dark comedy. We’re only held together by a wing and a prayer, apparently; otherwise our arms and legs would fly off, a foot here, a bone or two there. These things happen when you’re a clown of horror. And, speaking as we are of visceral, there’s lip-smacking fine dining onstage.

But in Mump and Smoot in Exit, black comedy is infiltrated by questions of good and evil, life and death. Religion — they are disciples of the god Ummo — is put to the test. Is memory a haunting? Can you really know if you’re in a bad dream or actually conscious? Mump and Smoot In Exit wonders about things like that. And so do we. It’s high-stakes hilarity, and we laugh and keep on laughing.

https://12thnight.ca/2024/10/11/the-existentialists-from-ummo-are-back-mump-and-smoot-in-exit-at-theatre-network-a-review/

“Welcome back to Planet Earth”
by Jo Ledingham

Ah, Mump. Oh, Smoot. Welcome back to Planet Earth. Where the hell have you been? And hell is the operative word. Michael Kennard (Mump) and John Turner (Smoot) are the dark clowns that haunt your nightmares. Mump is creepy and scary and mean; Smoot is endearing and sweet but weird. Together they could be the test tube offspring of Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett.

Who can fail to be reminded of Waiting for Godot at the very beginning of Mump and Smoot in Anything (with Knooma) when Mump and Smoot sit on a couple of trunks obviously waiting for god knows what? They look around, sigh. Smoot fidgets like a two-year old in Walmart. Mump frowns at him, makes that ‘quit-it’ patting gesture: both hands, palms down. They appear to be trapped in an undefined space – maybe even on a stage at The York? And that’s where Kafka comes in: what have they done to deserve this? Why Mump? Why Smoot? Why here? Why now?

A cult classic that returns to Vancouver not often enough, Kennard and Turner are directed by Karen Hines (Poschy’s Lips and, recently, Crawlspace). Hines admits to her obsession with, in her words, “these two beautiful freaks” and says she’s “waiting to get bored so I can be released at last from this exquisite compulsion.”

That will never happen. Turner and Kennard are boundlessly creative and you will wonder from what part of their brains do these wacky, existential ideas come?

Mump and Smoot don’t actually come from hell; they live in a parallel universe, a place called Ummo (pronounced ooh-moh). They worship a god called Ummo and they speak Ummonian, a gibberish peppered with recognizable words like “fourth wall”, “save yourselves” and “I don’t’ give a (gibberish, gibberish) fuck”.

Eventually, in this show, the fidgety Smoot, who has been warned not to pull the chain on a standing lamp, can resist no longer. He pulls the chain. Explosion. Smoke. Flashing lights. Electrical storm. Scary music by composer Greg Morrison.

In the next scene, Mump and Smoot are in a cage out of which they can obviously get free but haven’t figured it out.

Knooma (Jade Benoit) of the title is a sort of Angel of Death. Swaddled in flowing white layers, head wrapped in a white turban, she seems to float in and appears to be calling the shots – although it’s possible she’s mostly there to make the scene changes from The Escape, during which Mump and Smoot make a hilarious escape with the help of an audience ‘volunteer’, to The Romp and The Remedy.

The Romp is possibly the funniest horse-and-rider sequence I have ever seen. It feels a lot like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; trumpets blare, conquistador-ish Spanish music fills the air and Mump and Smoot emerge from the wings on horseback. They perform a military tattoo, with their ‘horses’ crisscrossing, sidestepping and eventually jumping over a trunk. Smoot’s horse is more like a raggedy old mule while Mump’s is white and proud and draped in blue silk.

Mump is the bully; Smoot is the bullied. Mump gets booed; Smoot gets cheered. God help you if you crinkle your candy-wrapper; Mump will skewer you. Don’t laugh at inappropriate places; Mump will scowl at you. And for heaven’s sake, don’t be late; Mump will destroy you.

There are blood and guts – pulled out of Smoot’s dead mule like a string of wieners – and severed limbs. Don’t take children; they’ll never sleep again.

Mump and Smoot are an acquired taste. Legions of theatregoers have acquired it as was evident when Mump and Smoot prayed to Ummo for their salvation. A surprising number of patrons joined in.

My prayers, as a child, were never answered when I asked for a monkey. I’m going to switch to Ummo and see if I have better luck. Might change ‘monkey’ to ‘a secure lease on my cottage’. So, with Turner and Kennard’s permission, I print the words here and urge you to join in the prayer when you see the show – assuming you have an adventuresome spirit and are okay with a dead horse on stage.

Arms raised in front, palms forward, bending at the waist, all together now:
“Ohno Moko Ummo, Ohno Moko Ummo, Ohno Moko Ummo,
Smullo, Smullo, Smullo,
Clippity, Clop, Clop, Clop, Clop.”

https://joledingham.ca/mump-and-smoot-in-anything-with-knooma/

“Mump and Smoot in Anything”
by Samar Sidhu

The celebrated theatrical duo, Mump and Smoot, return to Vancouver with a repertoire of anything (and everything)—a strange blend of empathy, fright and laughter. On opening night, the ‘clowns of horror’ garnered an auditorium full of thrilled fans eager to burst into bouts of hysterical laughter.

Mump and Smoot in Anything explores the pair’s adventurous journey fuelled by the obstacles laid by a ghost named Knooma, played by Jade Benoit, who is seen more frequently setting up props than frightening our heroes. The 80-minute performance is divided into three episodes. In the first episode, “The Escape”, Mump and Smoot are locked inside a cage by the vicious Knooma and the entire segment covers the protracted struggle of reaching for the keys. Right from the opening scene, Mump, portrayed by Michael Kennard, is delineated as pompous and cantankerous, who perpetually dominates the exuberant and subservient Smoot, portrayed by John Turner. The other two segments, “The Romp” and “The Remedy”, sporadically veer into sentiment, with sorrow being the connecting cord between the audience and Mump and Smoot themselves. The duo also confidently transcend sanity and venture into a world of idiocy with ease. “The Remedy” involves hilarious doctor/patient role playing, and is the best segment out of the three, with physical comedy at its finest. Over the course of their adventure, Mump metamorphosizes into a tender-hearted man, who screams with grief upon almost losing Smoot. Obviously, despite their differences, the twosome is deficient without each other.

Directed by Karen Hines, Anything is a comic masterwork for the idiosyncratic characterization of Mump and Smoot. After 28 years of successful theatre performances, Kennard and Turner have mastered the art of clowning and arrayed every nuance of facial expression effectively. Another favourite feature of the work is its haunting and emotive music, composed by Greg Morrison, that dramatically exhibits an unearthly habitat.

However, the plethora of surreal skit comedy has few and far between elements of horror. Furthermore, the opening scene is unamusing and fails to bring much laughter, but the plot’s framework builds up gradually with improvised interactions which hook the audience. In verbal absurdities and physical slapstick, the show is bonkers—but also fascinating. The performance is like the game Cards Against Humanity; fishing for amusement amongst the nonsense.

https://www.sadmag.ca/blog/2017/5/3/review-mump-and-smoot-in-anything

“Creepy clowns kick off festival”
by Joel Rubinoff

Who would have thought clowns could be so terrifying?

That’s the unofficial tag line of Mump & Smoot Cracked, the ambitious opening night kickoff of the prestigious Magnetic North Theatre Festival.

Sited as Canada’s premiere festival of cutting edge contemporary theatre, this beacon of cross-cultural pollination moves annually between cities and, this year, boasts 176 events over 11 days at venues around Kitchener and Waterloo.

And after one performance, one thing is clear: If these caustic comedy creations who joke in gibberish, ingest rubber mice in hilarious vaudevillian fashion and sever off limbs in grotesquely graphic detail are any indication, this isn’t going to be a
soothing festival of warmed-over Broadway claptrap.

Clowns from hell, they’ve been dubbed, and after 75 minutes of this Laurel and Hardy meets Jason from Friday the 13th, while Waiting For Godot excursion, you won’t know whether to laugh, cry or simply admire the audacity of creators Michael Kennard and John Turner.

This, of course, is exactly the point, as these fearless culture warriors seduce you with nonsensical outpourings and Three Stooges shenanigans only to upend expectations with a surrealistic turn toward tragedy that involves a pair of scissors and what looks like, ulp, a primitive hacksaw.

Played out on a cartoonish set that includes a giant egg, oversized diaper hammocks and what appears to be a pre-historic barber chair, the show juxtaposes discordant elements in a way that is by turns humorously engaging and, once blood starts spurting, deliberately provocative.

The subtext, if I read my existential allusions correctly, is that life may seem frivolous on the surface, but when you peel beneath the surface, believe me, buster, it’s bleepin’ brutal. Having said this, it’s an uneasy balance, and personally, I left the theatre feeling more unsettled than enlightened.

But I may not be typical. Not having experienced these Canadian comedy mavericks during their 22-year career—including an extended hiatus for the past eight—I may be out of the loop when it comes to appreciating their pathos-spiked fringe humour (plus I’m not, admittedly, in any way “cool”).

Certainly, the audience responded positively when Smoot, the squealing childish one, and Mump, the exasperated homicidal one, butted heads over the appropriate level of reverence for a giant mystic egg, debated whether to drink the colourful potions on their pre-industrial ice cream cart and, in a mesmerizing dream sequence, sashayed across the stage with near-balletic grace.

And the nervous titters during the act’s more unsavoury moments—and “unsavoury” is a word I don’t use lightly—indicated an audience willing to throw caution to the wind.

I won’t bore you with plot details of this dark, demented fairy tale, which involves faith, mortality and religious doctrine on a parallel world called Ummo and, at times, seems like a fleshed-out version of TV satire South Park.

Suffice it to say these gibberish-spewing misfits make beautiful music together—literally, on twin ukuleles—and are capable of both great tenderness and jarring violence as their fog-drenched world tightens its metaphysical noose.

There’s no actual dialogue, though their inscrutable outpourings do segue into recognizably English verbiage every now and then, but their performances are so note-perfect—and Karen Hines’ direction so clear and uncluttered—you never feel in the dark about the emotions on display.

They also—and consider yourself warned—make a point of interacting with the audience.

It’s a bravura act that will delight many with its outrageous subversion of a popular stereotype, but take heed: that “Not for children!” warning isn’t there for promotional purposes.

“Cracked: not just for adults”
by Sean Tyson

Is there a Mump without Smoot? This and more philosophical questions hide among the crevices of Cracked the final show in the Cultch’s 2009/10 season.

Welcome to Ummo. A world like our own, inhabited by creatures like us in many ways. Survival is an occupation, spiritual beliefs hold sway in the structure of everyday life in turn balanced by the great equivocator: Death. It is a world that supplies everything to the vigilant Ummonian, the cycle of life exists, actions have consequence.

I could go on and on about how deft John Turner and Michael Kennard are at riding the roller-coasters that are their performances, how small technical snags get mined for gold, how the audience must expect to be the 3rd performer and no one is safe. However, if you’ve ever been to a Mump & Smoot show then you know all this, and if you haven’t, then that is part of the treat. What I’d prefer to look at is the amazing way in which a message woven through this Ummonian tapestry is so relevant to lives in our world.

Mump takes pains to educate Smoot on the importance of knowing the difference between a liquid that refreshes and nourishes, versus the one that will kill him. Lovably innocent Smoot understands, but will still get it wrong. Here will begin the “end” as now the otherworldly duo must reveal their love for, dependency on and eternal connections to each other. Each character peels back their layers to show how they deal with the situation; Smoot eventually accepting and using the moment to get as much comfort as he can before the eventual, Mump railing against his beliefs, the forces of Ummonian nature and seeking anyway he can to save the life of his companion. The bond of love we witness is nothing short of Shakespearean in its exegesis, and though the story may be fraught with heavy themes, the world of Mump & Smoot allows us a safe distance to feel on a level below the play of comedy.

The struggle against the unknown of Death has captivated our imagination since the beginning of time. We continually seek ways to “answer the unanswerable” in order to mollify our fears. As adults we have already spent a great deal of time grappling with this issue and of course it’s always fun to watch a couple of clowns expound upon it, but I feel there is another, growing section of our society that needs these stories told to them in ways that invite them in and don’t beat them over the head with a proverbial stick. There are others that need to know it’s okay to love your friend so much that you would put their well being ahead of your own comfort. That even though our beliefs and ideals might be tested, our love for each other is all that really matters at the end of the day. That no matter what the odds of survival it’s okayto find a moment of humour or cherish a remembrance of a loved one. Sure, not all the adults in attendance will get this deep, but I think there are others actively searching for these stories in a world bent on highschool musicals and star-driven reality shows.

I’m speaking here of the youth. Judging by the news, they’re not as innocent as we’d like to think and probably on par with how young we were when Mump & Smoot first carved their way upon the scene. Perhaps it’s time to share the wonderful weirdness of these two with a generation that would benefit from these stories in more ways than one. As my lovely date commented, her precocious 9 year-old self would have “loved it!” more than she did now. Perhaps that means 15 year-old boys could learn a lesson or two. Perhaps these horror clowns aren’t just for adults anymore. Perhaps I’ve read too much into a hilarious evening with two of Canada’s best performers.

“Mump and Smoot’s Cracked runs the emotional gamut”
by Colin Thomas

Mump and Smoot bill themselves as clowns of horror, but they are also clowns of pathos. I couldn’t believe how moved I was during their latest offering, Cracked, trembling on the brink of tears when I wasn’t howling with laughter. And I realized that I have got to be nicer to my puppy.

In Cracked, Smoot makes an unfortunate dietary choice and themes of mortality ensue. There’s lots of blood. There are severed limbs. And one of the most excellent moments in the show comes with the crack of a breaking bone. The way that Michael Kennard (Mump) and John Turner (Smoot) play is so fucking unleashed, so unafraid of the dark, that it’s liberating. And that fearlessness leads to an exhilarating sense of being alive in the moment; there were several technical glitches on opening night but Kennard and Turner just ran with them, making them part of the performance.

Clowns are all about power or the lack of it. Kennard’s Mump is the boss, the parent, the dog owner. And Turner’s Smoot is the lackey, the toddler, the puppy.

Turner is one of the most charismatic performers you will ever see. With two stubby little red horns sticking out of his forehead, Smoot is pure id, bloodthirsty when he’s hunting for rodents with his club, terrified of touching Mump’s chair, shamelessly manipulative when he sees the opportunity. Smoot becomes disabled during Cracked, and he milks his misfortune as if he were on a telethon. But like a kid asking for her 18th glass of water at night or a puppy who wants to play when you’re writing a review, Smoot just wants to be loved, and you can’t help but say yes. Turner’s physicality is so vivid it’s like every cell in his body is on fire.

Kennard’s more cynical, contained Mump makes an excellent foil. And both performers are strong improvisers, even though they’re speaking gibberish, with the occasional bit of English thrown in: “I’m waiting for your cue, Smoot.”

Cracked sags a bit in the middle, and there are two scenes involving a pair of “surprise” characters, which feels a bit redundant. But the production values are fantastic. The flavours in Greg Morrison’s richly textured score include horror movie, pastoral, Balinese, and bicycle chain. Cory Sincennes’s lighting transforms the theatre into an otherworldly grotto.

Be prepared: if you go see Cracked, it won’t always make immediate sense. But confusion is part of the pleasure. Go with it.

https://www.straight.com/article-326276/vancouver/mump-and-smoots-cracked-runs-emotional-gamut

“Still cracking us up after all these years”
by Fiona Morrow

Imagine a space-age Laurel and Hardy with a splash of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon and a twist (the macabre variety) of Penn and Teller, and you might conjure something close to the attitude of Mump and Smoot. Of course, you’d need to add in clown suits, face paint and Ummonian – the gibberish that passes for language on planet Ummo.

Mump (Michael Kennard) is the happy idiot to Smoot’s (John Turner) haughty know-it-all. These are the odd couple of Ummo, sleeping next to each other in identical cocoon-like hammocks in a strange underworld affair where pulling a clanking chain brings on the day – and yanked again, the night. Their god is also named Ummo, and the pair are careful to genuflect before its idol – a green and red metallic cone – each time they pass by. Otherwise, their day is made up of mere survival – catching food and making ‘sloop’ – the blue liquid they drink.

With nonsense for a script (although the duo do slip into a fair bit of English along the way), the comedy is necessarily physical. Much hilarity, for example, comes from the simple act of catching and eating breakfast – a pair of rubber rats, beaten vigorously, shaken in a bucket of sloop, then swallowed whole.

But, like all good clown acts, scratch the greasepaint and a well of pathos bubbles up. Mump drinks from the wrong bottle of sloop and the more sinister fabric of life on Ummo takes over. Faced with his friend’s gradual demise (helped along by a gruesomely funny amputation scene), Smoot’s true colours show. To save Mump, he will try the unthinkable: defying the god Ummo, even in the face of the ever-growing blue egg that threatens their very existence. They love each other, this pair.

Eight years may have passed since Kennard and Turner’s last outing as Mump and Smoot, but on Wednesday – the world premiere of Cracked – they didn’t miss a beat reinhabiting their creations. Taking on any hapless audience member who uttered a gasp, sigh or any other slightly too loud exclamation, the pair seemed entirely at home in their fictional abode. (Be careful if you take an aisle seat – they are quite liberal with the use of their rubber clubs.)

They manage to balance the belly laughs with the more poignant moments – even combining both in a pitch perfect ukelele-playing scene – but there is some unevenness in the plot. The last third of the show has to work too hard to maintain its own logic, with an excellent nightmarish sequence trumping a far weaker ending, despite the best efforts of puppeteers Zu-Ma: Talent to Amuz. And, although the bursts of English make life easier on the audience, they become so plentiful as the show progresses, they threaten to undermine the artistic ambition of the project.

Not that the audience on Wednesday night cared: They hooted and hollered and stamped their feet and welcomed Mump and Smoot back to the stage with open arms.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/still-cracking-us-up-after-all-these-years/article4320760/

“Clowns conquer”
by Glenn Sumi
Rating: ****

Go and see Mump & Smoot in Flux and camping will never be the same again.

The demonic duo from the planet Ummo send up every “great outdoors” cliché in the book, and add a few frighteningly funny chapters of their own.

Entering from a side door in a hilariously lifelike boat, the horror clowns disembark onstage, attempt to set up a tent and then discover one problem after another – from a lack of a lighter (cue audience participation and one of the most surprising gags in the show) to the annoying reappearance of a vicious bear named, in their particular brand of gibberish, Boolawa (Scott Macdonald).

Working with a simpler set than in their last show, the clowns have carved out an archetypal tale of survival among the elements. Of course, as with all their works, the story is made funnier and emotionally richer by the character interactions, the annoyingly chatty and childlike Smoot (John Turner) constantly testing the limits of the bossy and seemingly dominant Mump (Michael Kennard).

Karen Hines’ direction ensures that every bump in the night is felt, and Greg Morrison’s soundscape – including a catchy song about the dreaded Boolawa – is as much fun as the performances.

Turner and Kennard are such deft improvisers that technical problems – and there were a couple on opening night – only mean opportunities for bigger unexpected laughs.

This is the clown duo’s first show in nearly four years, and their appearances are always reassuring and (dare I say it?) therapeutic. Mump’s ambivalent sighs and Smoot’s high-pitched pleas and occasional growls speak directly to our primal fears and joys.

Praise be to Ummo: the clowns are back in town.

https://nowtoronto.com/culture/clowns-conquer/

“Things that go bump in the starry night”
by Michael Posner
Rating: ***

It might be an ordinary canoe trip into the Canadian wilderness, two old friends confronting the elements. Entrusted to the dubious care of Mump and Smoot, however – two of Canada’s finest clowns – it becomes the camping experience from Hell. Or at least from Ummo, the fantasy parallel universe that the duo have more or less inhabited for the past 16 years.

Welcome to Flux, the latest – and possibly the last – professional outing for Michael Kennard and John Turner, which opened a four-week Toronto run on Wednesday night. Between them, Mump and Smoot have accumulated 32 years of theatrical know-how, and boy does it show. Flux is a clinic on clowning; if you’re not laughing, it’s only because you’re otherwise engaged, trying to figure out how they do what they do. When things go awry, as they did twice on opening night, they know intuitively how to turn the moment to comic advantage.

The evening’s plot framework itself is thin: they paddle into the auditorium in a polyethylene canoe that magically becomes their tent. Over the next 80 minutes (no intermission), they make camp, light fire, cook dinner and attempt to settle down for an evening under the stars. But on Ummo, as on Earth, there are ever-lurking hazards – spooky sounds, mosquitoes, accidental wounds, and most ominously, the great bear Boolawa.

Mump, the taller, more confident one, tries to allay anxious Smoot’s gathering fears. In their native Ummonian language, one part twisted English to two parts gibberish, they rehearse how to ward off the dread beast: cross your arms and make no eye contact. Together, they sing a song designed to dispel Boolawa’s evil spirit.

Of course, the exercise is futile. The bear, played with towering relish by Scott Macdonald, arrives, finding Smoot alone by the fire. A series of disasters ensue. I won’t give away the game, except to say that the world of Mump and Smoot, which is also ours, is a frightening place: the threat is never entirely extinguished, even when you think it is.

Like Beckett’s famous Waiting for Godot tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, the clowns are trapped in an existential zone – indeed, Campbell Manning’s spartan campsite set is only slightly more inviting than the one naked tree that adorns the Beckettian stage – with only their essential humanity.

In this relationship, Kennard’s Mump is the stern parent and teacher, Turner’s Smoot the impish, chatty, irrepressible child. Kennard makes a tool of his deep, gravelly voice, by turns patient and admonishing. Turner is a physical marvel; every step and stance instantly projects his emotional state, which runs the gamut from exhilaration to terror. The duo’s longtime associate Karen Hines provides nimble direction, while composer/designer Greg Morrison has penned a melodic but appropriately tension-raising score.

Mump and Smoot have announced that Flux will be their final show.

Regrettable, if true. But if true, they’re going out at the top of their remarkable game.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/things-that-go-bump-in-the-starry-night/article1335876/

“Mump & Smoot still pack wallop”
by Susan Walker
Rating: ****

If Flux is going to be the last mainstage show for Mump and Smoot, then they intend to out with a bang and a whimper. There is plenty of bang – literally – and more than a few whimpers of grief or remorse in this show, not all of them from the snivelling Smoot.

Michael Kennard and John Turner have been leading parallel lives as Mump and Smoot on the planet Ummo since 1986, regaling audiences through six full-length shows with their unique brand of clown – part horror, part slapstick, part pathos, underscored with an element of truth.

If they’re ready to hang up their running shoes an horned headwear, who can blame them?

Flux finds them in the Ummo wilderness. Paddling past the audience (and possibly paddling some members of the audience), Mump and Smoot enter from a side door, fixing the illusion of a lake at the edge of the stage. For the rest of the show, this will be the running gag, the fourth wall becoming a shoreline that is frequently crossed, always with the reminder that whoever makes the passage must appear to be swimming.

Mump and Smoot’s last show, Something Else, which ran in the same theatre in 1999, was notable for some major props and special effects. With Flux, the pair go low-tech, but with enough complications in the gear they bring on stage to guarantee a few extra laughs when something doesn’t work as it’s supposed to. After six show, it finally dawns on you that screw-ups are welcome opportunities for comic improv. Twice in last night’s performance, the action stopped – once when Mump misplaced a bloodpack – and then restarted, in live-action rewind.

The lengthy conversion of the canoe into a tent and the paddles into a spit over the fire mostly occupies Mump, while Smoot entertains the audience with camping and fishing stories told in Ummonian gibberish. It’s not long before the blood begins to flow, as Smoot cuts his hand while scaling a fish. And then the scary stuff begins. The mythic Boolawa (Scott Macdonald), subject of a rousing Ummonian campsong, appears in the form of a huge brown bear. Never mind that he looks more like a giant Gila Monster with hair, Smoot, left alone while Mump seeks refuge from his constant “yapping,” is terrified. By the third appearance of Boolawa – clowns always love the rule of three – not only Mump, but some members of the audience have begun to believe in him.

As Flux descends into utter mayhem, Mump and Smoot descend into typical wrangling. Smoot’s irrepressible enthusiasm dissolves into whining. Mump’s exaggerated savoir-faire turns to anger as he stalks off stage, with shouts from the seats reminding him to swim.

One detects an extended note of sentimentality as Smoot sits alone, wondering if this is the end of their act. But no,they are reunited.

Long live Mump & Smoot.

“Mump and Smoot revel in shadow, anarchic world”
by Peter Birnie

It’s not all balloons and baggy pants. Clowning can also have a dark side, and it’s this strange, seductive world that returns to haunt us when Mump and Smoot, clowns from hell (actually, it’s Toronto), bring their latest lunacy to town. Flux is sometimes horrifying and always hilarious, and any plans to bring younger kids to see this dark little fairy tale should be tempered by the fact that their brand of babble is peppered with near-obscenities in a story that can turn downright frightening.

Michael Kennard is Mump, growling and exasperat- ed, while John Turner’s Smoot has a high-pitched voice and a desperate need to be loved. Flux is about their camping holiday, which opens with the pair paddling into the Waterfront Theatre and closes in the chaos and blood so typical of this demented duo. In between lie about 75 minutes of clever physical comedy and inspired improvisation, all of it deeply rooted in the most primal parts of the human psyche. No wonder Campbell Manning’s simple set is mostly made up of barren trees and black curtains, as if this were a comedic Waiting For Godot.

The angst is palpable as Smoot must confront his fears of a beast he calls the Boolawa. We’ll meet the creature, as played by Scott Macdonald, and recognize him as a denizen of the deep woods made even more macabre in a costume by Jom Runolfson. There’s a quality of silent-film comedy to the battle between our boys and the Boolawa, but it also careers into a blood- bath worthy of Grand Guignol.

Kennard and Turner master a nonsense language that’s grammatically correct and cuts close enough to English to be easily understood. They’re also adept at tossing in an occasional clear phrase in English, often in a curse rained down on something or someone that’s displeased them. The weird world they inhabit, with worship to a great and dangerous god called Ummo, is so complete and real that the audience is simply a part of it, expected to be helpful when something like a lighter is needed and respectfully quiet when drama is dolloped out. When the opening-night audience dared to break the mood in one such moment, Mump simply cursed us and started over.

And woe to the poor woman who tried to leave with her little boy just before the show wrapped. Not know- ing that they could exit the theatre discreetly by an upstairs door, she attempted to lead the child down to the main-floor exit. I hope the kid recovers from the resulting assault, as Mump’s outraged behaviour led mother and son to flee back up the stairs.

Mump and Smoot offer comedy at its most anarchic, and Vancouver has always loved this edgy stuff. Beware the dreaded Boolawa of a sold-out run and phone for tickets now.

“Camping was never like this”
by Bob Clark
Rating: ****

Forget Flux – Michael Kennard and John Turner should call their new show Mump & Smoot Go Camping.

From the moment they paddle into the Martha Cohen Theatre until they disappear into their tent more than an hour later – in the wake of a dubiously graphic encounter with a Boolawa – Kennards’s Mump and Turner’s Smoot offer an inimitably comic take on making do in the wild unknown.

Billed as “clowns of horror who delight in the chaos of a nightmarish world,” Canada’s pre-eminent, and perhaps only, existential clown duo seems to have mellowed since its last appearance for ATP in Something Else two years ago.

Gone, for example is some of the satirical edge and grotesque anarchic nuttiness that characterized the earler work. Instead, in Flux we find our two hapless wanderers from the planet Ummo learning to get along in the kind of co-operative outdoor venture that most of us know all too well.

The patented Ummonian gibberish that passes between the two as they busy themselves copying with the forces of nature is as intelligibly conveyed as ever, thanks to the pair’s mastery of mime and vocal inflection.

Uttering the lion’s share of the show’s nonsense in his little-boy voice as he scoots and waddles around in his baggy red shorts, Turner’s Smoot presented a a lovable picture of arrested development. Kennard’s Mump, the straight-man in a clown act reminiscent of famous comedy teams of the past, got some the evening’s biggest laughs either through working the audience or berating it (a request for a lighter and the subsequent reminder to the person who volunteered it that he was moving through deep water was a particular favourite).

Through flawless timing and finely-calculated movement, Kennard and Turner showed once more how subtle and delightful the art of clowning can be.

The program notes somewhat portentously inform us that “Flux is a spiritually gothic horror clown play that deals with issues such as death, sadness, the environment, relationships, balance, fear and love.”

That may all be true, but what really comes across is the fact that – inspite of a muddled and seemingly arbitrary ending – Flux is very funny and ingenious entertainment.

Its appeal lies in the fact that we can let ourselves go and feel like kids, laughing at its inspired silliness without feeling self-conscious about it.

“A gruesom campout with the clowns from hell”
by Liz Nicholls
Rating: ****

In one of the great entrances of the year, Mump and Smoot arrive onstage through a darkened Theatre Network, by canoe.

The sound of rippling water, the flash of paddles in the moonlight, the cry of the loon, the whispered Ummonian floating in the night air. … Yes, the “horror clowns” from the planet Ummo have ventured once more unto the wilderness – in search of spiritual renewal? inspiration? a really big fish? The thing about camping holidays (and holy communion with nature generally) that makes a Mump and Smoot expedition into the Great Out doors such a delicious idea is the potential for turning tranquility into hell, on a dime. One mosquito in the tent, one Bic left at home, one grizzly bear with enormous teeth … and, damn, the moment is lost.

The macabre duo, who speak Ummonian, a gibberish language that has hilarious sporadic affinities with English, have bonded with nature before (Mump And Smoot In Tense, 1997). This new show, premiering in the Theatre Network season, has a different flavour from that gore-splattered declension into chaos and hostility.

Mump (Michael Kennard), the taller, graver one, the one in charge, seems sadder somehow, troubled perhaps. He needs this vacation. Smoot (John Turner), more excitable, more guileless, more easily squelched than his confrere, seems almost relieved to be away from whatever passes for daily routine on Ummo. Being Smoot he can’t resist trying more and more loon calls, ecstatic at being bilingual when the loon answers. But Mump’s inevitable Shhh seems milder than usual, or Smoot anticipates it sooner. The same watchfulness inhabits the moment when Smoot with sinking heart realizes the lighter isn’t in his backpack, and Mump, suddenly weary if not exactly conciliatory, grits his teeth, says it’s OK and sets about finding one in the audience.

As they set up the tent, gregarious Smoot chatters away to the audience in top-speed Ummonian, confidentially recounting past camping disasters. And Mump’s normal edge of eye-rolling exasperation is weirdly tempered by a look that hints at a certain “listen to yourself, Mump” fatigue with his role of being the doer, the arranger.

There is something to be resolved here: Mump and Smoot, who have been to hell and back together, with hold-overs in purgatory, these last dozen years, are in Flux. Their new show, directed by longtime associate Karen Hines, is framed by a quest that’s more indefinable than usual, something you might want to call reassessment if you don’t mind annoying people.

It sets the the post-apocalyptic Smothers Brothers up in a gothic landscape full of manly activity, from building a campfire (think about Mump and Smoot playing with matches and shudder) to impaling a creature and roasting it on a spit. And fishing! Now, there’s a relaxing pastime, with Smoot’s glee at catching and clubbing one turning to horror at the fact of death. They’re enjoyably spooked by the woods, and instead of a campfire tale with a bogeyman, they share a dark vaudevillian ditty about Boolawa, the mythical bear who haunts the wilderness. In their musical theatre debut (music by Greg Morrison) Mump sounds a bit like Tom Waits.

There are solo philosophical ruminations. Smoot’s delight in the beauty of the stars turns to the existential horror of being a small lone being called Smoot in a vast, empty and possibly meaningless universe. Mump has a crisis of faith, too; even his horn seems to be giving him a headache.

Typically they fall out over belief. Mump’s irritable skepticism has to be readjusted when Boolawa actually shows up, and like every villain in a Mump and Smoot show, he’s impressively huge and ferocious, not just some toy bear. Smoot actually rises to the occasion, which startles both clowns to no end. Yes, it’s all good gory fun, calibrated to start small and mount, from the cut on the hand through decapitation and disembowellment, and an apology that is more momentous than either. The chemistry is winningly, and precisely, set forth in this delightful show.

And as usual, we get to join the fray, since part of the fun of any Mump and Smoot show is how quick Kennard and Turner are on their feet, and how playful they are about the whole theatrical illusion. A woman who left to pee will be regretting that last beer today, I should think, since she had to swim through the theatre.

“Horror clowns triumph over the wilderness”
Rating: ****

As a kid, I was totally, wildly terrified of clowns, from their wide grease-paint grins down to the tips of their floppy shoes.

Not that I was alone. Loads of childeren are terrified of clowns, maybe because of a deep, dark subtext that’s unexpectedly built into the persona. Something about the form leads to an almost instinctual deconstruction of the darker side of the human condition. (Stephen King’s evil demon clown in It or the hedonistic Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons jump immediately to mind).

Another case in point: the work of Michael Kennard and John Turner, the talented clown duo know (and wildly loved by Edmontonians) as Mump & Smoot, the self-proclaimed “clowns of horror” currently playing in their brand-new full-length show called Flux.

Embracing the sinister underpinnings of Boxo-dom, the accomplished acting team (a perennial Fringe favourite since the late 80’s) in their lastest romp riff off of the über-Canuck past-time of camping, taking a particularly perverse and blood-soaked swipe at what would seem to be a placid hobby.

Leave it up this horned couple to turn the banalities of starting a fire, setting up a tent and fending off mosquitos into hilarious physical/prop comedy fare. (And that’s even before the fearsome “boolawa” shows up.)

Needless to say, this no Thoreau-esk Walden Pond sojourn. Almost the exact opposite: despite their desire for peace and quiet, the deeply frantic clown couple just can’t stand any kind of stillness, and they sabotage the prospect of a restful forest visit whenever it threatens to emerge from the wilderness. Even Turner’s seemingly innocent attempt at taking a philosophical break and contemplating his relative insignificance in the face of a star-rich wilderness night – no mean feat going this deep, given that the duo work almost entirely in gibberish – leads to him having scream-filled panic attack. What a fine theatrical jewel: think Campfire Girls meet Sartre.

What impresses the most is how endlessly literate this comedy team is (especially given how accessible and basic their humour might be – Commedia del Arte meets Barnum and Bailey) and how layered their performances end up being. How many troupes do you know who can deftly and seamlessly parody a children’s song crossed with musical theatre and opera styling – without benefit of recognizable text?

“Evil clowns appeal to bratty kid in us”
by John Coulbourn

They charm us with their childlike innocence.

But they delight us with the child-like evil that, when you strip off the rose-coloured glasses, goes hand-in-hand with that innocence.

For Toronto’s Mump and Smoot it’s been a fail-safe formula for success, and while they continue to refine it, they certainly aren’t meddling with it in a major way in Mump & Smoot In “Something Else” With Zug.

With an assist from Zug – a cross between Aladdin’s genie and the devil himself – Mump (Kennard) and Smoot (Turner) are able to live out their egocentric dreams.

This latest show from the brilliantly demented minds of Michael Kennard and John Turner opened Sunday night at the Berkeley Street Theatre in association with Canadian Stage.

This time, the demented duo from the planet Ummo forsake their worship of their native god in favour of an evil magician named Zug (played by perennial villain Rick Kunst).
With an assist from Zug – a cross between Aladdin’s genie and the devil himself — Mump (Kennard) and Smoot (Turner) are able to live out their egocentric dreams.

But whatever it is they turn their hands to, there’s a pitfall, it seems, from Mump’s go at magic, Smoot’s turn as a celebrity chef and Mump’s fantasy of world conquest. Things just never quite seem to work out.

Babbling on in Ummonian – a language that occasionally intersects with a plainspoken English bor dering on bluntness, the two become what is perhaps the ultimate child in all of us: Innocent to be sure, but also selfish, self-centred and completely unaware of anything remotely resembling consequence.

In a world where clowning is too often synonymous with sloppiness, it is perhaps as much the staging as a unique style of clowning that separates Mump and Smoot from a herd of also-rans.

Under the direction of Karen Hines, Something Else With Zug is exquisitely if occasionally primitively staged, building from a strong first act into a second that is pure theatrical bliss-madness and magic of the laugh-out-loud variety.

Working on a remarkably adaptable, inventive and evocative set created by Campbell Manning and lit by Michel Charbonneau, Kennard, Turner and company create a complete world in which they cocoon their audience in a show that turns the entire theatre into a stage.

“Why these clowns won’t be appearing at children’s parties”
by Robert Cushman

Mump and Smoot are a pair of aggressively clownish clowns. Mump wears tight shiny-blue pants and Smoot, a baggy red smock. Mump has a blue spike sticking out of his head while Smoot sports a pair of little red horns, so they’re colour co-ordinated all over.

Mump is dictatorial and thin, Smoot is subservient, though with cheeky moments, and chubby. Their relationship is like Laurel and Hardy with the dimensions reversed.

They are Toronto favourites, accepting outside bookings as well, but I had never seen them before. Still, from what I have read about them, I gather that they have been much the same from show to show, as one would expect.

In Something Else, which is their first full-length show with an intermission, they are first seen edging their way along a catwalk in the side-wall of the theatre, while making conversation in words that sound like WONGA-WONGA. When they arrive on the stage proper, it turns out to be a lunar landscape dominated by three large cones and a small plinth. After a certain amount of puttering and muttering the middle cone explodes to reveal a third character, a sinister fellow named Zug with an echo chamber in his throat.

He terrorizes them both, making a wimp out of Mump and reducing Smoot to jelly. He proceeds to take control of their destinies. Vladimir and Estragon have finally found Godot, and much good it does them.

My research tells me that Mump and Smoot have run up against Zug in previous shows, but clowns, like comic-strip characters, seem never to learn from experience. They just keep right on, battling the same old adversaries. Zug, however, is offstage most of the time, and I suspect that what Mump and Smoot get up to behind his back is little different from the way they would behave if he’d never joined the cast.

They go through a series of routines. One is a magic act. In a variant of sawing the lady in half, Mump shuts Smoot up in a box and, despite his protests, chops off all the bits of him that protrude: his arms, his legs, even his head. The severed sections, very red and raw, are displayed to the audience; this presumably is why the show is billed as unsuitable for children. When Smoot seems, understandably, to be dead, Mump is distraught. When he miraculously returns (Zug does seem to have something to do with this) Mump is relieved.

There is a restaurant sequence, in which a member of the audience is brought on stage to serve as customer (and, on the press night, gave as good as she got); and a war sequence in which Smoot dons fatigues while Mump wears a Napoleon hat and tunic, and they pelt one another (and us) with cannonballs; and an interplanetary sequence. This includes a truly magical passage in which the two, in white spacesuits, float weightlessly through the air, limbs gently flailing. It also has the show’s finest comic moment: Just before take-off our two astronauts fling themselves to the ground and give themselves over to terrified prayer.

The language they speak is called Ummonian (the programme says so) and it’s gibberish that sometimes verges, to humorous effect, on comprehensible English. It’s a joke they use a lot, and it generally works. Even funnier, though, are the times when they break down and ad-lib what is definitely English, usually goaded into it by some intransigent member of the public. During the miltary campaign, Smoot descended into the auditorium, and asked a punter to write something on a tablet. When he got it back on stage and Mump told him to read it he found, apparently, that the man had left it blank.

“It’s not,” Smoot spluttered “my fault he’s a friggin’ mime.” Those of us who distrust mimes even more than we distrust clowns were cheered by this evidence of dissension in the ranks.

Michael Kennard plays Mump and John Turner, Smoot. They have strong personalities, and seem completely confident in what they are doing, and in one another.

“Clowns love throwing each other curves”
by Jon Kaplan

The press release for the latest Mump and Smoot show warns that the piece isn’t suitable for children.

Ironically, it’s exactly the child in adults that the clown duo target in their outrageous and appealing productions the mischievous child who wreaks gleeful havoc in a seemingly ordered world.

In the pair’s newest show, Something Else, they “seek their destiny” and find themselves set against a baleful genie, Zug, who allows them to live out some of their desires. Not surprisingly, mayhem ensues.

Substantial difference

Local audiences saw a workshop version of the piece in last April’s World Stage Festival, but the new version is substantially different. And that’s just what the creator/performers want.

“We’re organic in the way we develop a show,” says Michael Kennard, aka Mump, the tall one with the big blue spike on his head. “Our material constantly changes, which means that our work is different from most stage productions. Usually, a production is set by opening and doesn’t vary after that but everyone who’s been involved in our creation stays around until the last performance and tinkers with the product.

“Clowns change because their creators change. The challenge for Mump and Smoot is creating new material that doesn’t repeat earlier shows, so we constantly have to discover new things in our relationship to play with.”

“We’re pretty good at accepting curve balls at any time during a run.” laughs John Turner, whose playful, red-horned Smoot is, I must admit, one of my stage idols. “That’s partly because after working together for a decade we’ve got a lot of the junk out of the way. We have a shorthand way of relating, a language that our coaches also speak. We now have eyeball conversations, and sometimes we’ll answer questions in unison.”

Those people – including director Karen Hines, movement coach Fiona Griffiths, associate director Jim Warren and voice coach David Smukler – are essential as outside eyes, shapers of the wacky material that Kennard and Turner develop.

Roles reversed

That material usually has Mump as the strict, organizing parent and Smoot as the child whose exuberance is merely tolerated, but at times the roles are turned around.

The performers spent part of the summer in Fredericton filming a kids’ show called Blue Rainbow, in which they reversed the roles of controller/controlled as the shaven head figures Dirk and Drock, who speak a cousin language to the gibberish tongue of Mump and Smoot.

Mump and Smoot’s popularity has grown tremendously, in part through the Fringe experience. They’ve toured the circuit regularly, developing and honing material, and have also gone on to acclaim in the States – the pair are associate artists at Yale Repertory Theatre and have won theatre awards in Boston and California and have twice been to Israeli festivals.

But Something Else affords them several new challenges. It’s their first two-act show, and it’s being copresented by mainstream-oriented Canadian Stage.

“For one thing, having an intermission lets us rest.” smiles Kennard about their highly physical work, which often has them interacting with the audience. “But it’s also a shift from the Fringe mode shows that were vignettes or had short through-lines to a full evening of theatre, one where we can re-rig the set for surprises in the second half.

Technical demands

“It’s also more technically demanding, with involved sets and props. For the first time, we have three other figures onstage, including musician Greg Morrison, and the result is a different environment than we’re used to.”

“We hadn’t thought about the length of our works at first,” admits Turner, “but even 75 minutes was a long time to stay at the energy level required of us and also of the audience. The trick is going to be how to leave viewers engaged when intermission comes and then engage them again when we come back.”

“Be careful what you wish for”
by Liz Nicholls
Rating: ****

The premise is seductive. What would Mump and Smoot wish for if they stumbled on a genie?

Clown wish fulfilment isn’t normally something that should turn your crank, if you have any self respect. It’s a redundancy for one thing. What else does the red nose, big-foot brigade do except run around exercising their inner exhibitionist on wishes? All that “spontaneous” wishing on a star a little kid’s smile, a red rubber ball, etc. can really get on your nerves. Inhibition can be a good thing.

The prospect of Mump and Smoot negotiating with a genie, however, is instantly mesmerizing. How would the macabre clown duo from the planet Ummo want to change their lives? What kind of dreams do “clowns of horror” have anyway? Instant gratification for this post-apocalyptic Abbott and Costello is a particularly intriguing idea to juggle since the relationship between the graver, more formal, more manipulative Mump (Michael Kennard) and guileless, more excitable, more malleable Smoot (John Turner) is so fraught with friction and aggro anyhow.

You remember what happened when Mump and Smoot undertook a sort of wilderness quest in the Ummomian outback (Mump and Smoot in Tense)? Well you know what camping’s like, all that gore and panic. And as they say you never really know your friends until you travel together. Mump and Smoot In Ferno starts with the proposition that travelling is hell an continues through a disastrous air voyage that will take our clownly pair into the Great beyond, a landscape that includes death, dismemberment, cannibalism and loss of faith. Samuel Beckett’s clowns had it easy; they got to wait around for Godot.

Intermittently desperate devotees of the god Ummo – between existential crises of faith – Mump and Smoot take themselves at the outset on a sort of religious pilgrimage to a sacred temple. And, chattering away in Ummomian, a gibberish language you’ll swear you’re on the verge of understanding, their incantations unleash not oracular wisdom from Ummo but a genie who grants them wishes. Something Else is named for that vague but powerful sense of dissatisfaction and indefinable need for change. But in the latest offering from this highly original pair with the manic energy and relish for the grotesque, the antsy desire for “something else” is turned back on themselves.

In Zug, who hurls wishes like missiles, they seem to have released a fiend from hell. Zug (Christian Laurin) is gleefully scary, with a growling amplified voice, an evil laugh, a certain zest for chaos. Smoot is so wowed that he impulsively wishes for a rock, and gets it.

The show unrolls as a series of “wish” vignettes linked by Zug and by a brilliant, improvising musician. Greg Morrison as Fingers sits at the keyboard like the Phantom of the Opera. And the score he creates and plays for the production (directed like its predecessors by Karen Hines, of Pochsy fame), is amazingly expressive and allusive, with standalone interludes and nods to vaudeville, Mussorgsky, rock opera…

Wishes turn into escalating disasters. Mump’s wish to be a magician turns into a riot of tawdry showbiz gone wrong. Very wrong, witness the gory amputations, the bleeding stumps, Mump’s moment of horror when he’s left with the bloody cleaver. Even the old standby, the rabbit from the hat, turns gross-me-out. Meanwhile, Smoot, cast as the lovely assistant, continues to smile his nervous show-must-go-on smile and create a free-form dance diversion.

With the inspired Chef Smoot routine, the pair venture into the audience and pluck a willing victim to dine onstage. The creation du jour doesn’t give up the ghost easily. The solution: staple it to the plate.

Mump’s authority always becomes oppressive, literally in a military sequence, perhaps a bit overlong and to my mind the least inspired (which is to say still darned funny). It sees the halflit Roxy erupt in war, cannonballs and blood, plus an affecting death tableau. We get to join in.

But, then, the audience is always a part of a Mump and Smoot show. Their taste for the morbid, and the way their schemes tap into exasperation, malice, revenge and short-lived regret, are part of us.

“Unique loonies clown around”
by Geoff Chapman

Then send out the audience if it’s that pair of horned horrors Mump and Smoot unless the throng who’ve paid good money to watch the duo skid along the razor’s edge between the revoltingly grotesque, the bathetically touching and the wild excesses of slapstick want to stay.

They do stay, and cheer, for Mump (alias Michael Kennard) and Smoot (alias John Turner) and even willingly take part in the frequent moments of interaction between stage and stalls during the cultish pair’s opening of their third show Ferno at the Poor Alex Theatre last night.

You want a plot synopsis? It’s not advisable with the one-pronged, whitefaced, Spandex-panted, lei-draped Mump and the two-pronged, yellow-and- red-faced, aproned, lei-draped Smoot plus red noses but no oversize feet – prancing through 70 minutes of clowning fantasy. It has something to do with their crashing a makeshift, fan-powered plane and seeking survival by fervent prayer to a glowing God-cone dubbed Ummo. Maybe.

Why Ummo? Because they speak Ummonian, of course, a giddy gibberish that sometimes sounds close enough to Canajun eh? to make it funny. Not all the time, however, and you’re free to interpret the batty exchanges as you will.

M and S are agile, imaginative and technically adept at clownmanship. On occasion they indulge in some S & M, or just plain M, such as cannibalizing the limbs severed in the crash, squeezing “blood” from same, brandishing skulls and belaboring each other physically and verbally. They spit, too.

Yet in an age inured to Stephen King, Clive Barker and seedy Hollywood nasties, this hardly backs up their reputation for being grisly shock- and schlock-meisters. The creative chamber of horrors may be bizarre and sometimes fascinating but it only begins to hint at the foggy melange of manipulable innocence and downright devilment that may dwell deep in our psyches.

Nonetheless, there are large laughs to be had from these squabbling loonies, the dominating severe Mump and the hysterical whining Smoot, even when intelligible roars and words are few. And there are wild moments of black-light theatre, smart use of sound and light and some appealingly clever facial and body motions to sustain the unruly – and surely unique – performance to its conclusion.

The humor tends to exhaust itself toward the end of a show that’s really too long for its level of intensity, but what do you expect from a bunch of clowns?

“‘Ferno’ Makes a Gesture of Understanding”
by Nancy Churnin

A JOLLA-A tale of two clowns: the tall and lean Mump, with shiny blue tights, blue high-tops and a long blue horn on his head; and the short and squat Smoot, with baggy red shorts, red high-tops and two smaller red horns on his head. But it’s not just the clothes and the bright red noses that distinguish Michael Kennard’s Mump and John Turner’s Smoot from Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello and George and Gracie.

The Toronto-based team, now wreaking havoc in the West Coast premiere of “Mump & Smoot in Ferno’” at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Mandell Weiss Forum, brings a fresh twist to the form by eliminating language as we know it. They speak gibberish-supposedly the language of Ummonian from the land of Ummo-but make themselves understood by gesture, inflection and emphasis.

They use this trick to distill their parts into the yin and yang of comedy in its purest form. They interact with an audience that understands them perfectly, whether Smoot is tricking one patron into throwing a ball at Mump, or Mump is solemnly soliciting another to take a wildly posed picture.

By speaking their nonsense with conviction and, yes, clarity, they offer a peek into the wonderland of how much we convey by body language, and the way we say something rather than what we actually say.

“Ferno” shows Mump and Smoot doing their shtick as they wait for an airplane. When the pilot doesn’t show, Mump decides to fly the plane himself. They crash and experience dismemberment, death and life after death while conveying a panoply of complicated emotions-wrenching, desperate and loving as well as funny.

Under Karen Hines’ expert direction, the show works so seamlessly, you can’t see her hand at all. The emphasis is on the performers as it should be-as alone in the world as Beckett’s Didi and Gogo.

And they play their parts to perfection. Kennard’s towering Mump stares down Smoot and the audience with as much intimidation as ego itself, determined to control. Turner’s ingenuous Smoot plays the mischievous id sneaking around Mump’s directives with anarchic delight.

“Fringe buzzes under greasepaint and swear”
by Liz Nicholls

Inside hothouse venues, sweat and applause were dispensed in similar quantities. It was my first look at a couple of Canadian “horror clowns” who have brought a new and nightmare, not to say apocalyptic, edge to the red-nose brigade.

Mump and Smoot they are (alias) Michael Kennard and John Turner), gibbering away hysterically in an invented language that you’ll swear you’re on the verge of understanding. Smoot, the more guileless erupts with glee on the least provocation; Mump has the demented formality of the manipulator. In their manic energy, their relish for the grotesque, their knack for mesmerizing stage pictures, they’re quite unlike anything to be seen on either hard or soft theatre seats in this country.

Mump and Smoot in Ferno (Stage 11) is their latest offering. And it starts with the witty premise, which Dante might have appreciated, that hell is travelling. Mump and Smoot, giddy with anticipation, clutch their tickets and their suitcases, alternating panic and euphoria. They even. have someone in the audience take their pictures.

Mump decides he can fly the plane himself. And they’re off, on a disastrous air voyage that will take them, finally into the Great Beyond, and their creators into a very dark, risky comic terrain that includes death, dismemberment, cannibalism, and loss of faith. The friends even try to beat each other to death, but find that they’re already dead.

The risky frontier between laughter and horror is handled expertly. In one memorable scene, Mump uses his own severed arm to comfort his wounded friend, and later tries to strangle himself with it. When they are reborn, whole, it is a moment of real magic.

“Mump, Smoot show funny, technically fascinating”
by Cam Fuller

They look outrageous. They speak no known language. And yet you can identify with them.

Yup. The chief fun in watching Mump and Smoot is spotting perfectly human personality traits emerge from decidedly imperfect
creatures.

The clowns of horror, Michael Kennard (Mump) and John Turner (Smoot) returned to the Fringe with a genuinely funny and technically fascinating show called “Ferno.”

To say much is to give much away. But imagine Laurel and Hardy going on a trip. An acid trip. Being mischievous clowns and all, they get fed up waiting for the pilot and fly the plane themselves.

The aircraft is a wonderful wooden boxes with electric fans thing to behold: a structure of for engines all mounted on a tractor tire tube for takeoffs and dives. Especially dives.

Turner and Kennard are masters at creating laughter by dropping in a few words of English at the perfect time, by improvising to overheard comments from the audience-even by going through the audience collecting candy.

The performers’ professionalism shone through during an unfortunate technical glitch that delayed a vital sound cue in their spectacular soundtrack. Breaking the deafening silence, they cackled “Fringe, Fringe, Fringe,” and did a brief standup gibberish comedy routine that was funny enough to make it seem part of the show.

“Smoot and Mump put on an amazing show in grotesque Ferno.”
by Pat Donnelly

In comedy of the grotesque, death is the ultimate joke. The only thing that can top it is cannibalism.

If you can’t see the humor possibilities of someone gnawing a sev ered limb, then perhaps you-and your children should stay away from Ferno, presented by Toronto clowns Mump (Michael Kennard) and Smoot (John Turner) at the Montreal Fringe Festival.

Connoisseurs of clowndom, however, shouldn’t miss this amazing show.

Kennard says Mump and Smoot help people deal with their innermost fears.

From this point of view, Ferno is therapy for those whose fear of flying is combined with a fear of becoming breakfast once the plane has crashed.

OK, they are a little twisted. And they speak a most peculiar brand of gibberish. But unicorn-horned Mump and devil-horned Smoot are quick-witted wonders.

The show I saw this week was plagued by technical difficulties. But the clowns never let down their act for a second as they left the stage to consult with a technician, then threatened a walkout.

They finally decided to use the audience as one big sound-effects machine. Things went so smoothly that most of us thought the elec tronic breakdown was just part of the act.

Spontaneous interaction with the audience is Mump and Smoot’s specialty anyway as one young lady who couldn’t quit cracking her bubble gum soon found out.

“Entertainment on the edge of eccentricity: Clowns gone awry”
by Elizabeth Maupin

When you think of clowns, you rarely think of severed limbs.

Round red noses, maybe, and faces painted in colors rarely seen on man. But rarely severed limbs. Rarely mutilation. Rarely blood.

With Mump & Smoot, though, a pair of clowns from Toronto, you get both the round red noses and the blood. Performing in the Orlando International Fringe Festival this week, Mump & Smoot expand your notions of what clowns are supposed to be. And at the same time they’re making sure they’re excluded by Barnum & Bailey, they’re also making you laugh.

Spouting a gibberish that sounds at times like German, at times like French and at times like a language you once might have known but have forgotten, Mump & Smoot board an airplane, experience its crash, die and somehow rise from the dead. (If there’s a religious allegory here, it’s too deep for me.) Yet the business at hand never gets in the way of a host of distractions berating the sound and lighting guys, aping the coughs in the audience, even running out into the street to shush the crowd outside. These clowns may be as dark-natured as anything Samuel Beckett ever dreamed. But they’re as engaging as two clowns have a right to be.

“‘Caged’ savage brilliant theatre”
by Max Wyman

No one is going to be able to see every one of the 100-plus shows at this year’s Fringe Festival – it’s a physical impossibility. But any best-of-Fringe choice is going to be incomplete without Mump and Smoot in Caged…with Wog.

I can’t remember any show in Vancouver in the past year with the shuddersome emotional impact and deep laughter-out-of-pain comic power of this one.

These people are clowns, but don’t take your kids anywhere near them. What they give you is the black stuff of nightmare… starting with the cramped cage in which innocent, dog-primal Smoot is confined by the wicked archetype of evil and cruelty, Wog.

This is savage, brilliant theatre that taps into our most recessed guilts and fears. Evil’s command over innocence, tyranny, betrayal the big themes of tragedy – are reduced to elemental essence and played out in comic crayon colors.

Theatre of despair, theatre of the absurd, theatre of cruelty, black comedy… stir up Beckett, Artaud, Monty Python and the great clown Grock, color it acid rainbow and you get the beginnings of this enormously disquieting, spectacularly funny show.

These people have the gift of the great clowns they show us the shabby, unvarnished truths about ourselves… and let us laugh at them.

“Vancouver Fringe”
by Lloyd Dykk

On almost every street corner within a 10-block area of Mount Pleasant you see these three metre-high square-built purple sentinels, plastered solid with posters advertising shows in the Vancouver Fringe Festival.

They’re hoardings, but with personality. Designed by Ken Macdonald, they’re take-offs on the old gaslight architecture of the area, with cornices echoing the caps of the surrounding old stone and brick buildings. The columns’ stateliness (jazzily balanced by a painted trim of fake cow-hide) suggests a quality of establishment about the Fringe, and since this is the sixth busy year for the alternative theatre festival, it would be hard to quibble.

People were even lined up an hour early outside Heritage Hall on Thursday to catch the 4 p.m. performance of Mump and Smoot, one of 50 shows a day in the 11-day event.

Mump and Smoot, from Toronto, scream Fringe-quality..They’re… clowns, but clowns of horror. You’d be advised not to take your children to see them because the show, called Caged with Wog, seems dredged from primal nightmare.

Imagine that the Godot that Vladimir and Estragon were waiting for had arrived and turned out to be the devil. The spookiest thing about the show is its repetitions. Mump, the manipulating clown, and Smoot, the sweet, funny, submissive one, are prisoners of a routine torturer. Regularly, the black-clad Wog arrives with her apparatus, pulls Smoot’s arm through the bars and on to her.. rack, stretches it three times its length, and then draws blood with which she anoints her mysterious shrine.

She withdraws and the dithering,. hysterical clowns, chattering in a gibberish language that becomes oddly comprehensible to us, are left to try and re-plot their escapes. anew. But always, Wog returns.

Escape, it seems, would not really be all that difficult. But Mump and Smoot are creatures of habit. Or maybe there’s something about freedom that frightens them even more than than their captivity, which may be hellish but still something they know. The play, if you can call it that, is very close to the heart of the absurdist playwrights.

It’s rich with implications and also very funny in a way that’s difficult to describe. John Turner, as Smoot, is a fabulous clown – a complete charmer. That it seems his show is no slight, however, to the talents of Michael Kennard as Mump and Debbie Tidy as Wog.

“Mump and Smoot a must-see”
by James Parker

Just how much treachery and terror can one Ummo take? It’s a question Mump and Smoot, two rather animated members of that species, ask themselves Review as they do battle with the villainous Wog, a ghostly, bloodsucking, high-priestess of evil.

Or at least they seem to ask themselves that question, once or twice anyway.

One can never be sure, since they speak a language last heard on a Doctor Who episode, sort of a hybrid of pig Latin and Vulcan.

Thankfully, language isn’t a barrier in this zany, absurd and rewarding play, entitled Mump and Smoot in “Caged” with Wog.

Created and written by Toronto actors Michael Kennard (Mump) and John Turner (Smoot), this Fringe offering combines elements of the Bowery Boys, Star Trek, Dracula and almost any buddy movie you can name, creating a yuckfest of the first order.

After a somewhat pyrotechnical opening Thursday night – a strobe sitting in for lightning-an imprisoned Smoot appears on stage.

Wearing maroon, diaper-like sweat pants held up by red suspenders, red hightops, red and white makeup and two little horns on a bathing cap, Smoot looks like a cross between Bozo and Beelzebub.

Unfortunately, he possesses the emotional moxy of the clown. Smoot’s a blubbering fool, kept in the cage by Wog, a fiend thirsting for his blood.

But there’s hope.

Suddenly Smoot hears a gazoo. It’s Mump, the brains of the duo, making contact.

And soon he appears, clad in green spandex, blue high cuts, black tails and a navy-blue bathing cap with point.

After a tearful reunion – intense Ummo bonding the two distraught but not completely defeated creatures endeavor to extricate themselves from the grasp of Wog.

And this isn’t – easy, since she’s a mean witch blessed with the one quality they lack – intelligence. It all sounds pretty ridiculous, and it is. Good, nutty fun, a wing ding of a time, involving deceit, torture and religion. And it all hinges on the physical talent of Kennard and Turner, who lend their characters wonderfully expressive faces, neat gestures and the right voices (Turner sounds an awful lot like a stressed out Cookie Monster).

The three actors interacted with the audience during the performance, bantering back and forth and recruited one young woman to hold their sacred book.

The audience responded by hissing at Wog and giving advice to the craven Smoot, who doesn’t exactly exemplify loyalty.

A good time was had by all, as the standing ovation attested. Mump and Smoot is a must-see.

“A Twisted Track for A Mystic Trio”
by Jan Stuart

Confession, we dreaded this show for two weeks before going, mostly because we couldn’t get the damn title down. Mutt & Jeff Engaged With a Wok. Mumps & Measles in a Cage with Chickenpox. Surf & Turf in Sage with White Wine. Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Wall.

Then there was this business of the tag line. Clowns of Horror, it called itself. Oh dear, we thought, we’ve barely recovered from Dick and Spiro Up a Creek With Watergate.

Well, mea culpa, my fine Mump & Smoot. Mea maxima gaucheness. These Canadian fools are not to be dreaded, but awaited, indulged and savored. “Mump & Smoot in “Caged’… with Wog” (by Mump and Smoot, fools subject to the cruelties of Wog George, we’ve got it!) is an unexpected answer to a burnt-out theatergoer’s prayers.

The feeling of dread actually speaks very much to the heart of this mystic and oddly endearing entertainment. Fear and dread hang over Mump and Smoot, two naifs imprisoned by a malevolent sorceress named Wog. The pair are subject to her medieval cruelties, which involve slowly draining her captors’ blood till they are reduced to dead and very shrunken heads.

Wog (impersonated with ferocious hauteur by Debbie Tidy) is a mythic analog for all the power abusers who have ever bled our spirits: the punitive school teacher, the demon parent, the ungrateful boss, the unswerving dictator. Mump and Smoot are the latest wrinkle on the existential fall guy, the Everyman buddy-buddies alone at the edge of the world. With their horned caps, bulbous noses and pancake eye masks, however, they are closer to big-tent Laurel and Hardys than new-age Vladimir and Estragons.

Smoot (John Turner) is the simpleton, the well-meaning but hopelessly malleable child-man who is quite easily drawn into Wog’s lair. Mump (Michael Kennard) is the strategist, forever exasperated by his chum’s naivete but touchingly devoted, nonetheless. And a bit of a meathead as well. Indeed, if there are any tortures to match Wog’s barbarities, it is the absurd pretzel-shaped obstacle course Mump and Smoot lay out for themselves to attain the freedom that is within easy reach. This is an escape story, pure and simple. Or rather, ostensibly simple. “Caged” tracks the twisted, Rube Goldberg-ian path that people often take to get from points A to B. Much of its goofball charm derives from the ways in which the pair get the audience to collude in their convoluted plans. Then there is their squealing vocabulary. Mump and Smoot converse in a gibberish that is slightly to the left of English, close enough so that we know what they’re saying and far enough so that we are reminded of just how random and weird language can be.

Turner (the one in the green tights and spiffy yellow blouse) and Kennard (the one in the ripped violet Tshirt and red shorts) convey the squeamish innocence of two kids acting out the sort of grisly scenario that only children can invent. They are magnetic punchinellos, maintaining an equally facile grip on pathos and slapstick, with strong atmospheric assist from director Karen Hines, lighting designer Michel Charbonneau, set man John Dawson and composer David Hines.

I admire the insiders who were savvy enough to catch this eccentric brew of Grand Guignol and New Vaudeville during the low-priced previews. Whatever the tariff, Mump, Smoot and mean mama Wog are worth their weight in gold. Not fool’s gold. The real thing.

Theatre traditionally has been forced to exaggerate its conventions for its audience. Rarely does the old adage of “less is more” apply. However, Theatre of the Absurd broke ground n doing just that. It was met with mixed reviews: artists appreciated the subtle nuances, while audiences were reluctant to storm the box office.

A perfect compromise has been struck by the unique comedy trio of Mump, Smoot and Wog (Michael Kennard, John Turner and Debbie Tidy, respectively) by presenting this absurdist piece with universal appeal.

Mump and Smoot are on an expedition in search of “something”. Along the way they encounter the mysterious and malicious Wog who provides a form of “tragic relief” by inflicting minor annoyances on the two comic travellers.

They manage to evade her playful wrath enough to engage in some of the most irresistible and contagious humour on stage today. Their pot-shots at restaurant manners, funeral etiquette and the medical profession are both incisive and accurate.

This keen perception coupled with Mump and Smoot’s refreshingly childish innocence make their humour not only funny, but sincere.

The fact that so much is conveyed so successfully with no set, minimal props and a script of gibberish (with dashes of at least five languages) is proof that Theatre of the Absurd can be for the masses too.

“Something Lovable and Grotesque”
by Bernadette DeSantis

Brace yourselves. Mump and Smoot, those lovable “clowns of horror” have returned to Toronto with a vengeance named Wog and a twisted comedy called Something that’s going to make you die-laughing.

Mump and Smoot are Toronto clown duo Michael Kennard and John Turner. The more sophisticated Mump is the domineering partner, lighting th epath for the wayward Smoot, forever chastising his apologetic playmate for his ineptitude. Clown class buddy Debbie Tidy is Wog, the personification of Mump and Smoot’s scariest nightmares. Their act is the Twilight Zone version of some of the best-loved comedy classics from Laurel and Hardy to Monty Python. It’s ghastly, it’s gruesome, and it’s great. It’s improv comedy at its best.

Something is a series of theatrical sketches loosely connected by Mump and Smoot’s curious search for “something”. This mtsterious treasure hunt draws the frightened duo out from the dark theatre and propells them through a stomach-turning spaghetti dinner at a snobbish cafe, a sportive social call with the remains of a departed clown friend, and a bloody romp through the doctor’s office. Mump and Smoot will do anything for an ooh or a yuk from the audience. Mump doesn’t even wince when he accidently pulls his patient’s right leg out of his socket–tendons dangling and all–during a routine examination, leaving the dismembered Smoot to hop about on one leg begging for the return of the other.

While all the sketches are equally demented, my favourite scene is The Wake. Mump and Smoot approach the coffin of their dead clown friend crying and wailing and clinging to each other in a heartwarming display of genuine grief. But you can’t help laughing at them because they look totally ridiculous in those one – and two – horned spandex bathing caps they wear on their heads. By this time, the audience has gotten used to that incomprehensible gibberish they speak, so the focus shifts to watching their gestures.

They both move in for a last goodbye. Smoot tries to copy Mump’s gestures of a remorseful handshake, but the clumsy Smoot winds up tearing the dead clown’s arm out of its socket. His own horror lasts just long enough to get himself a reprimand from Mump.

But before he puts the sinuous arm back in its socket, the incorrigible Smoot decides to have a little fun. The arm instantly becomes a baton, back-scratcher, even a baseball bat. Mump just can’t resist getting in on the fun and the two sorrowful mourners wind up in a gruesome game of baseball with guess-what-part-of-the-body as a ball.

You might be wondering why, after all these violent grotesqueries, I call Mump and Smoot “lovable.” The answer lies in the impeccable performance of Kennard and Turner, who convince us that Mump and Smoot are clowns first, before they are monsters. If Mump victimizes his gullible playmate for a few kicks, all Smoot has to do is turn his sad clown eyes on the audience to win some sympathy for his cause. Besides, it becomes obvious that neither one of them is very wicked, they just delight in playing gruesome games.

But Wog, the silent villainess, has enough malicious intent brewing behind those stern eyes of hers to do all three of them in. She is the one who casts an evil spell over Mump which forces him to operate on Smoot with a pizza cutter. (Fortunately, Smoot’s wounds are nothing that a handy staple gun won’t fit.) Wog is a deadly serious authority figure, and Tidy’s performance is completely consistent with this characterization.

If you see one show this semester, see this one. I guarantee you’ll walk out grinning from ear to ear. Warning: You may not sleep at night!

“Clowns from hell offer something wild and new”
by Lisa Taylo

If you believe the Fringe Festival exists to offer around and throw things, and speak a gibberish something wild and new, you’ve got to see Mump and Smoot.

These two clowns from hell (or thereabouts) turn just about every bozo cliche on its head before adding skits no mainstream rubber-nose would touch.

Their show is understandably listed as performance art/dance. Mump and Smoot tend to run all their own. But the characters are the highlights.

Suave and self-important Mump and his Hardyesque sidekick Smoot will draw you in to the point where you end up chanting to raise the dead. That’s after the duo defiles a corpse, hunts for treasure and eats dinner. Yes, eats dinner.

The make-up and costumes are wonderful and carefully thought out.

Mump and Smoot will make you laugh, take sides and do silly things. They’ll also send you smiling out of the theatre and all the way down the block.

“Mump and Smoot in Something with Wog”
by Bob Remington

If you see no other show at The Fringe, see this.

Mump and Smoot, two “horror clowns,” walk into the room with flashlights and a treasure map, bewildered by their surroundings and easily startled by anything that moves and several things that don’t They are looking for something, but what it is we’re not sure. Mump and Smoot don’t speak English, you see, communicating instead by using their own language, which sounds like cross between Sanskrit and gibberish. Out of this incomprehensible gobbledeegook emerges a completely original play that is easily the best thing I’ve seen so far at The Fringe.

Mump and Smoot’s treasure hunt gets sidetracked by an Alice in Wonderland-type journey in which they are placed into a variety of situations by the expressionless Wog, a perfect villainess with a pasty white face who looks like something out of Night of the Living Dead. Instead of a rabbit hole, a black obelsik leads Mump and Smoot into Wog’s netherworld, where they: 1) are treated to dinner at a cafe where Wog is the waitress, 2) attend the funeral of a dead clown they obviously know, and 3) become doctor and patient (with, Oh no! Wog as the nurse!) when Smoot becomes ill.

Despite the indecipherable dialogue, the clowns’ distinct personalities are evident. Mump (the one with the unicorn-like spike sticking out of his head), is the dominant, more refined of the two. Smoot (the one with the red horns) plays, well, the clown.

This is fine theatrical comedy in which even the change of sets is done as drama, with Wog as stage | manager alongside a black-robed monk. Thank you Michael Kennard (Mump), John Turner (Smoot) and Debbie Tidy (Wog) for a truly unique show.