Deven and Joel

We saw their show on Friday night. What great fun! Everyone should see Deven and Joel.

Deven Green and Joel Bryant are a married couple and comedy duo. She's tall, lanky and gorgeous, he's compact and rather hunky. On stage their physical contrast is striking, and it works really well in their act. Deven uses her body in a way that seems to extend the height of the stage to the ceiling. She's like a beautiful spider monkey.

Once they hit the stage their energy is nonstop. They toss the focus back and forth like comedy ping-pong. Everything they do is tight and purposeful, and they have total command of the room. The way they relate to each other is charming, and you really feel that you're watching two people who are in love and who love performing together.

For one bit they invite a couple from the audience to come up on stage. One night Lindsay and Kyle were that couple. The couple stands next to a table that has a hotel desk bell (for correct answers) and an electric buzzer (for wrong answers). Deven and Joel go into a little scenario and make statements about the couple, and they will hit either the bell or the buzzer to move the story forward. It's pretty funny. At one point the husband and wife were whacking that bell almost constantly in response to the silliest statements. The room roared.

They did this thing I've seen on Who's Line is it Anyway, where they'll hand microphones to a couple of audience members and have them provide the sound effects for the story. That's always a risky thing to do, because you never know if those people will understand what they're supposed to do. It took some prompting, but eventually they got it rolling. The woman who had a mike never did get it, but Deven and Joel used that and made it funny anyway.

The whole show was really fun. Deven sang a couple of her mash-ups and played her uke. Later in the show they did a funny and rather touching pantomime about the evolution of their relationship. I'd like to see them as often as I can.

They're coming to Claremont next month.