Jake Hurwitz & Amir Blumenfeld with Streeter Seidell – review

2 / 5 stars
Soho theatre

Jake Hurwitz and Amir Blumenfeld are a double act who make sketches for the US website CollegeHumor.com. On the strength of this live outing, one fears for the state of American education. The evening starts on screen, with Jake singing a song about a man "sucking his dick". Soon, Amir is rapping about a woman being "ankle-deep in my semen".

Their redeeming features are that they're cheerfully making one another laugh, and unaffected in their enthusiasm to share that with an audience largely formed (it seems) of their diehard fans. But there's little here for outsiders. Hurwitz is the straight man, recounting Blumenfeld's supposedly outre behaviour on their flight over. Blumenfeld reads a poem about his top 10 London experiences so far, most of which involve trips to fast-food restaurants. They cackle a lot, as they find various ways to repackage tales of puerile behaviour as comedy.

The middle section is given over to the standup of Streeter Seidell, executive editor of the CollegeHumor site. His workmanlike solo set keeps the Jake and Amir fans onside with some "dick" and "balls" material, and reheats tired US stereotypes by joking about guns, being fat and loving McDonald's. Knowingly or otherwise, he also apes a famous Bill Hicks routine, mocking the quaintness of British crime, with "pickpockets" substituted for Hicks's "hooligans".

Seidell's is a competent club set; nothing more. And there's no spike in quality for the show's final third, a quiz about American news, food and TV, in which two audience members compete to avoid singing a Katy Perry song on stage. The whole game is predicated on the unremarkable insight that US (much like British) pop culture can be cretinous. Which, by the end of this show, we hardly need telling.
