English as a Second Language

BY ALDENTE FETTUCINI

 

These are the times that try men's souls. Those are words that often define the lives of entertainers, especially jugglers. Here we offer a tale of the functionally insane world that gives us, the Fettucini Brothers, a reason to get out of bed in the morning... or the early afternoon depending on circumstances!

 

We had the pleasure of working for six months in Japan. We are a verbal comedy juggling act, like everybody else these days. Needless to say our mother tongue is English, or what passes for it in the public school system. So, how do two goofy American boys translate a chatter­box routine into a foreign language like Japanese? We don't! I think Pig Latin is the only language that would work, and there's not as much demand for that as there once was.

 

We adapted by attempting to do more physical comedy and running the few Japanese words we knew into the ground. So after running our act three times a day for six months in Japan, guess what happened when it got plopped down again in the middle of South Carolina USA at a comedy club? If you burn to know the answer, keep reading. If not, I think the Brady Bunch is on; go in peace.

 

We were back in the country for nine days before we began a tour of Comedy Zone rooms. We were the middle act for a headline comedian, but were soon to find out we were in no position to cast stones. The first show of the tour was at a place called NiteLite's at the Embassy Suites in Columbia, S.C. Our first show in English in six months.

 

The nine days preceding the show was a time of recovery for us, from jet lag if nothing else. We didn't run the show or even talk through it until the day before the show. We thought, much like Custer must have, "What could happen?"

 

Well... We got there that afternoon to hook up our microphones and got our first look at the stage. It was maybe six feet square and it was raised up so that our feet were at seated head level. Not only that, but the stage was cut off from the rest of the room by a steel railing running 10 feet in each direction. You see, a major part of our act involves getting people from the audience on stage with us. This makes the rest of the crowd more reluctant to throw things, as they might hit one of their own! But it's not easy to grab people when you're five feet in the air surrounded by 20 feet of cold steel.

 

After we did our sound check, we retired to our room to run over lines and relax in a tense, worried sort of way. We were supposed to do 20 to 25 minutes after a local MC, then the headline comedian would do 45 minutes to an hour. That's the way it was supposed to go, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans!

 

We took the stage feeling very proud that they had printed "just returned from six months in Japan" on our introduction. We quickly found out that in Columbia that didn't mean squat. Our opening lines got nothing, and the flop-sweat began to form on our upper lips. Then that sweat mustache quickly spread to parts of my body I wasn't even familiar with.

 

We started our three club-up-to-six routine. We did steals with three with a very poor excuse for patter, and dropped twice onto the table at our feet. The nightmare had begun to take shape, and things started to look like that acid-drenched battle scene in Apocalypse Now. Oh the horror! The horror!