Usually, it’s hard arriving to a show late. You walk in offbeat, unable to click into the rhythm of the show. But the Infinite Pizza Party DX, by USyd comedy group Burger King Illuminati, gave me no chance to catch my breath. Within seconds, I was breathless with laughter, along with the rest of the audience.
We were crammed into a shipping container at the Factory Theatre, which connected the audience with the actors from the start. The tiny space, littered with prop-filled empty pizza boxes, felt like a uni student’s sharehouse.
The show, a surreal collection of utterly unrelated acts strung together through political satire and eye-opening existentialism, was a thing of absolute beauty. Comprised of a series of unrelated events, the scenes struck political nerves, ridiculed capitalistic concepts, highlighted twisted historic events, and reminisced on Star Wars, How I Met Your Mother and even Yu-Gi-Oh. The night was almost indescribable in its absurdity; at one point, I was transfixed by two French wannabes killing an ignorant tourist and stealing his baguette.
Burger King Illuminati skilfully weaved simple scenes together by jumping back and forth between different stories, and connecting statements made at the beginning of the show to major scenes at the end. All throughout, a chilled, monotone voice – what I imagined as the voice of a skinny redhead, with an love of high-tech equipment and Pokémon Go cards – would randomly share irrelevant statistics in an attempt to break the ice in a social setting, filling the spaces between the acts. This method of linking the stories together and giving the audience background information was incredibly effective.
All four actors were visibly nervous at different times; sometimes their mad-libs following the background voiceover were out of sync, and momentary confusion and excess sweating started to show. However, they effortlessly laughed these moments off with the crowd, blending these ‘mistakes’ into the show, which lent the night its charm.
This mind-numbingly funny show was a joy to see. The quirks, twists, and brutal comedy of the show will stay fondly in my memories for a long time to come.
