Comedy caper goes downhill

VOLANTE. Did better than other participants.

First, the good news: The second telecast of the new show, “Banana Sundae,” last Sunday after “Asap” was an improvement on its debut show last Nov. 15. It looked and felt lighter and tighter, and the members of the show’s resident ensemble appeared to have learned their lesson and didn’t laugh at their own attempts at humor.

It was also a relief that those hoary, old “knock-knock” jokes were nowhere in sight. And Angelica Panganiban and John Prats paced the proceedings with welcome crispness.

A compilation of black-out gags about balut vendors, and another one set in a beauty parlor yielded some actually funny punchlines, so we felt even more upbeat about the follow-up telecast’s prospects.

Unfortunately, the ensemble started stumbling badly with its “Kantaranta” ad-lib songwriting segment, which flopped as badly as it did on the show’s premiere telecast. The cast simply wasn’t gifted enough for the portion’s “improv” requirements, although Nyoy Volante did better than the other participants. If the gang can’t get things right in terms of spontaneous lyrics and music, the long portion should be scrapped.

Another really old and tattered comedy skit about a radio drama with a single technician producing all of the sound effects similarly bombed. Those old comedy concepts should be left buried in the graveyard of the golden age of radio—where they belong.

By this time, the cast had become unprofessional once again, and was laughing at its own mistakes, making the sadly inept scene even worse. The show ended with a quiz tilt that required contestants who came up with wrong answers to be zapped in the face with a pie. The running gag was, all of the participants ended up with pie faces—including the quizmaster!

The members of the slap-happy studio audience laughed their heads off at all of the primitive silliness—and the show’s facile finale left us wondering when this comedy caper will actually become as funny as it claims to be!

‘Celebrity Playtime’

Last Saturday, “Celebrity Playtime” featured a competition that had a team member sketching images that would help his teammates correctly guess the title of a song. Many of the contestants did badly at this specific task, because they were poor sketchers whose squiggles and scribbles were well-nigh unidentifiable!