ORIGINALLY POSTED ON STRAIGHT.COM, JAN. 30, 2010
While we filed through the doors of the River Rock Show Theatre to see the Trailer Park Boys last night a dude in a CFOX t-shirt was handing everyone Hershey’s Kisses. He instructed us not to eat them, but hold onto them for an “important” part of the program. Little did we know how much lowbrow hilarity could be crammed inside a scrap of silver foil.
Conky—the screechy-voiced, antagonistic puppet that Bubbles created in his own image (i.e. with coke-bottle glasses) for episodes of the TPB’s Showcase TV series—opened the show via video, promising to reveal to the crowd just what kind of “stupid fuckheads” Ricky (Robb Wells), Julian (John Paul Tremblay), and Bubbles (Mike Smith) really were. He’d sabotaged the trio’s show by stealing their video cameras and hiding them in various locations, so we got to spy on Ricky when he did things like wipe at his butt then smell his stinky fingers. Believe me, it’s funnier than it sounds.
“Okay, you guys remember those Hershey’s Kisses you got when you came in?,” asked Julian at one point. “I want you to eat them now.” Then when most of the crowd had a mouthful of sugary goodness he announced: “Okay, everybody owes me a buck for the chocolate, pay up!” and he threw out the empty plastic container Ricky had previously been videotaped peeing in. But instead of filling the jug with loot, the audience began pelting the stage with either Kisses or coins. An hour later, the odd loonie or toonie was still rolling across the stage. It was Oasis’ worst nightmare.
In one gutbusting segment, the perennially cash-strapped Julian came up with another way to separate the crowd from its coinage. He rolled out a dolly with a grill on it and said: “Okay, anybody who wants a fuckin’ hot dog get up here.” Within 10 seconds a crowd of about 30 people—some suffering from the munchies, others clearly attention-starved—gathered around him while he handed out dogs for five bucks a piece and earned himself a substantial wad of cash—much to the chagrin of Ricky, who’s always looking for an easy score himself.
“Okay, everybody get the fuck off the stage,” ordered Julian when the weiners were gone and the crowd overstayed its welcome. “It’s not fucking picture time!” he explained in exasperation while camera-phones flashed and the show transformed into a chummy onstage love-in.
Backstage afterwards the adoration continued as the trio patiently posed for photos with and signed autographs for their diehard followers. As the last souvenir-scrounging straggler headed away Ricky was heard to utter the immortal words: “Is that it? Can I get fuckin’ drunk now?”