What a bunch of Idiots!

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2003 (8459 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

to splitting cards with a whip,

offbeat Texas trio aims to please

By Kevin Prokosh

KEVIN HUNT is confident at least one Winnipegger will literally eat up the stage silliness of The Flaming Idiots.

The highlight of their hour-long show is watching Idiot Rob Williams make a baloney sandwich with lettuce, with cheese, with mustard, with olives on a toothpick and, most amazingly, with his bare feet.

It’s the feat that got him on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2000 and a Guinness Book World Record of 116 seconds for the fastest sandwich made with feet.

“He even cuts it in half so somebody can eat it,” says Hunt, matter-of-factly.

When he is told that’s not likely, Hunt begs to differ.

Apparently, only twice out of hundreds of shows have people balked at taking a taste.

“Someone always eats the sandwich,” he says with a confidence moulded by 19 years of acting like an idiot.

“Someone will capitulate and when they take that bite, it will send the audience over the top.”

That’s the modus operandi of this Texas trio, opening a short run at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People tomorrow. They have made a career out of provoking amazed audience members to gush, ‘How do they do that?’ if not ‘Why would anyone do that?’

Essentially, the Flaming Idiots is a juggling act that got away on Williams, who goes by the stage persona Gyro, Jon O’Connor (Pyro) and Hunt (Walter).

Juggling is an art form that is really popular only among other jugglers.

So these modern vaudevillians from Austin have built up certain specialty acts to be sandwiched between the juggling of bean bags chairs, bowling pins and fiery torches.

Some might call them stupid people tricks.

“No one wants to see a juggling show,” says the Dallas-born Hunt during an interview this week. “There are only so many ways you can juggle, so we try not to be predictable when we do it. We take our skills to places that people don’t expect.”

Some Winnipeggers with long memories will remember The Flaming Idiots.

These jugglers of off-the-wall humour played the third annual Winnipeg Fringe Festival in 1990, and a Buskers Festival a few years earlier. Williams is the verbose frontman of the threesome, O’Connor is the goofy, Kramer-ish Idiot, and Hunt is the understated everyman with a penchant for pitching punchlines.

“Comedy works in threes,” he says. “Boom, boom, bang is the rhythm of entertainment. Boom, boom, boom is not funny.”

The guys find that people who have seen them don’t forget them, if not for a particular routine, at least for their unassuming name. Flaming Idiots is the name they chose of their own free will, by the way — not a malicious epithet offered up by an unimpressed spectator.

“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Hunt says. “People are always calling us idiots but some say it with contempt. But they always remember us.”

Although considered an adult act, it doesn’t take much tuning for younger audiences. As a rule, the group is not crude or inclined to using foul language. Some of the innuendo has to be cleaned up, but that’s about it, Hunt says.

No matter who the audience, the Idiots won’t allow anyone on stage to take part in Williams’ whip act, in which he throws a playing card up in the air and splits it with his whip.

“Rob is a good target whip-cracker, but you don’t want to have anyone holding the card or anything,” Hunt says.

“It’s fairly safe but you don’t want to rely on the audiences to have nerves of steel.”