General Fools Festival: Samurai Davis Jr. and Dim Sum

That’s not the full title up there of the closing show for the General Fools Festival; that would actually be “Samurai Davis Jr. and Dim Sum’s Super Mega Happy Fun Time Improv Show”. It’s an improvised Japanese game show which General Fools’ Jayden Pfeifer refers to as the “Gwar of improv”.

“There are teams that are competing against each other, doing scenes,” says Pfeifer. “The audience votes on which one they liked more, and if you lose, you get punished onstage in increasingly elaborate and demeaning ways.

“Usually tarps need to be used to save the stage. Part of the rule is that if you’re doing the show, you can’t wear anything that you don’t want to get wrecked.”

The format has appeared at the General Fools Festival before, but, when the General Fools knew they’d be bringing back Dad’s Garage, they also knew they had to do Samurai Davis Jr. and Dim Sum.

Luckily, they’re pulling from a huge list of punishments, so if you saw them last time, you won’t see the same thing again.

“Renee from their company e-mailed me to say, ‘Do you remember what punishments we used back in 2009?’ I sent him a list of the ones I can remember, and he was like, ‘Good. We won’t repeat them.’”

While the improv is in important, the punishments really are a big selling point.

“The punishments take sometimes five to seven minutes. They involve music cues. They involve casts of people coming onstage to do things with elaborate props. There’s all this improv in the show and then there are these elaborate punishments that are worlds onto themselves that they’ve all sculpted out.”

Last time it came through, Pfeifer remembers getting what’s called the Volcano Pants.

“That involves putting a two-litre bottle of Diet Coke between your legs and having to put your face over it and then they dunk an entire tube of Mentos into it, so it creates a ten-foot rocket of soda into the air.”

Samurai Davis Jr. and Dim Sum’s Super Mega Happy Fun Time Improv Show closes out the General Fools Festival tonight, June 9 at Artesian on 13th. For more information, go to their website.