Dropout TV premiered its new comedy show Crowd Control on Monday, and it’s exactly as promised: a series-length extension of the season 7 Game Changer episode of the same name, where stand-up comics are asked to improvise routines about the members of a small audience whose T-shirt prompts about themselves suggest worthwhile topics. In the premiere episode of the series, Bob the Drag Queen, Leah Rudick, and Dimension 20 DM Brennan Lee Mulligan face a room full of people whose shirts say things like “Whoredrobe” (a woman with an entire wardrobe full of kink gear), “DM” (“dungeon monitor,” a safety coordinator for a kink space), and “Big Baby.” (Surprisingly, not a kink thing.)
The big twist for the series-length expansion of the show, though, is a segment that host and Dropout writer-performer Jacquis Neal calls “Torture the Comic,” where he sets limitations on the contestants, specifically designed to target and hamstring their individual styles. In the premiere episode, Bob is ordered to perform as if he/she/they were in a library: only speaking in whispers, and without using their hands. Rudick, whose whole persona is “naïve, innocent, and wholesome,” is instructed to do her routine “as if you were just publicly canceled.”
But Mulligan drew the worst limitation: an order to perform without using “a single big word whatsoever,” which turned out to mean not just polysyllabic words, but basically any word that couldn’t be grunted. He was also forbidden from making historical or literary references. Over the course of the bit, Neal and the audience called Mulligan out for using the words “what’s” (instead of “what is”), “strange,” and “sick” — both of the latter were deemed too complicated even as single-word responses to information from audience members!
Mulligan was game during the mercifully short bit, adopting a guttural, caveman-ish voice and speaking in blunt, broken English: “Me no like!” he said in response to being told “strange” was “too big” as a word. Problem is, the entire gag wound up feeling like a lost opportunity. Unable to say much of anything to the audience, Mulligan was reduced to one-word responses to people who seemed to have been expressly selected for him to interact with, like the guy who apparently built an entire medieval tavern in his basement as a setting for his D&D games. (Mulligan: “Tight! Cool guy.”)
I get that the entire point of the bit was to let the audience laugh at Mulligan’s discomfort and his struggles to produce comedy without any of his tools for comedy. And limiting his vocabulary and references certainly was an appropriate challenge for the man who, earlier in this same episode, responded to an audience member’s comment about learning Elvish with “Oooh! Quenya or Sindarin?” and corrected Bob on a hat-maker being called a milliner, not a haberdasher.
But at the same time, the whole point of Crowd Control is theoretically to mine humor out of audience members’ unique stories and situations. Bob the Drag Queen did fine with that while whispering, in spite of completely breaking at one point. Rudick, if anything, got bonus material out of the “act like you’ve been canceled” instruction, peppering her questions and comments with a belligerent bro voice and aggrieved side comments like “Am I not allowed to say that?”
Mulligan, on the other hand, was basically cut off from asking meaningful questions or from giving meaningful responses, which made the sequence repetitive and stilted. I really just want to see him sit down with Basement Tavern guy for a makeup session where he gets to fully verbally unload, the way he does with scene descriptions in Dimension 20 and Worlds Without Number, or with elaborate speeches like his conspiracy rant in the Game Changer episode “Yes or No.” At the very least, here’s hoping that future episodes of Crowd Control make the torture challenges more additive, like Rudick’s prompt, and less subtractive, to the point where it undermines the entire point of the show.
That said, the Crowd Control concept still produces a lively, enjoyable show, just as it did on Game Changer. The audience participants are diverse, with a lot of intriguing hooks for comedy. And the overall vibe of a shared party, where all the viewers and all the comedians are rooting for each other, makes for a winning atmosphere. It’s just going to be hard for future episodes to beat the premiere’s exploration of an audience member who self-identified as “Xandiloquence Bizarre,” and who was wearing a homemade hat constructed from pressed, dried cucumbers. Imagine trying to interrogate that in single-syllable grunts.
New episodes of Crowd Control air on Dropout TV on Mondays.
