Oct. 01--There's a Grabowski-like sensibility that improvisers Ryan Archibald and Craig Uhlir bring to the stage, which isn't as common as you might think from such a resolutely Chicago art form. They arrive wearing bandannas tied around their foreheads, "Karate Kid"-style, like a couple of weekend warriors looking to drain a few cans of beer and crush them on their heads before firing up the lawn mower.
I know nothing about either man, and looks can be deceiving, but that slight lunch-pail quality to their personas feels distinct. That aside, there are all sorts of reasons the comedy show "Search Engine" shouldn't work. It lacks internal discipline. Both performers need to make stronger story choices and work more on creating singular, three-dimensional characters. But there's a specificity to their combined energy -- Uhlir tends to be the weirder one, bouncing off the more stolid Archibald -- that is winning and often funny. Sometimes very funny.
With its improvised scenes connected by a theme (travel, on the night I attended) and interspersed with improvised songs (with Dave Asher on the keyboard), the show has a spryness to it that isn't clever so much as enjoyably cockeyed. Consider this moment from last week: Uhlir played a teenage girl recovering from a skiing accident that mangled her knee, after which she removed a metal screw (literally, a random piece of hardware that was lying around onstage) from said knee and automatically assumed she was a robot and headed over to the airport to go through the X-ray machine to find out once and for all: girl or machine?
This is a lunatic turn of events, and yet it felt like a logical progression. (Confirming her robot status, Uhlir-as-teen then proceeded to talk in dialogue that consisted only of zeros and ones, a binary-code joke that warmed my nerdy heart.)
There is a lot that is unexpected about this duo. Their most profane song on that night was also the most moving (a son asking his dad, "Why are you such a ..." -- um, disappointing father), and right off the bat their instincts were in the right place, riffing about the awkward pause that followed their request for an audience suggestion. Now that was funny.
2.5 STARS
In an open run at iO Theater, 1501 N. Kingsbury St.; tickets are $12 at 312-929-2401 or www.ioimprov.com/chicago
