Walsh brothers take Alternative path to humor
Boston Herald – May 6th, 2008

By David Wildman  / Comedy  |   Tuesday, May 6, 2008  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Arts & Culture

After years of hosting shows at ImprovBoston and the Comedy Studio, the Walsh Brothers left Boston in 2007 to join the high-profile stand-up scene in Los Angeles. Now a success with their own weekly club show on the West Coast, they are returning home to play the AltCom! Alternative Comedy Fest, which comes to the Somerville Theatre on Friday (with Eugene Mirman, Emo Phillips, Todd Barry and Doktor Cocacolamcdonalds) and Saturday (with Patton Oswalt, Morgan Murphy, Jim Jeffries and the Walshes).

Don’t expect the Walsh Brothers to arrive in a limousine. And don’t expect a standard stand-up act. The Charlestown-bred brothers’ brand of humor remains difficult to contain, categorize or cash in on.

“It usually takes us about 13 minutes to start to be funny,” said David Walsh, the closest thing to the twosome’s straight man. “We’ve auditioned for shows like ‘Jay Leno,’ and we get everything from ‘They’re too weird, they’re too alternative’ to ‘They’re too crazy.’ ”

“A phrase we hear often is uneditable,” added Chris Walsh, who with his mad Muppet eyes and mischievous attitude acts as his brother’s constant foil. “Our timing is such that we stumble over each other, which is not very TV-ready.”

Former Massachusetts Senate pages, the Walsh brothers - whose MySpace [website] page gives their age as “68 years old” - have made a name for their antics offstage as well as on. They scored a hit at the Montreal Comedy Festival last year with a routine about how David had been forced to sneak over the Canadian border due to his criminal past.

They then made a huge splash at the HBO/U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., partly because of a stunt where they hijacked a bus full of tourists and drove them around town haranguing them.

A management company liked their anarchic style, signed the brothers up and began booking them all over the country. But before leaving Boston, they planned a Viking funeral: a ceremonial burning of all their Boston memorabilia in the Charlestown harbor. Unfortunately they chose to do it on Jan. 31, the same day as the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” terrorist scare, and narrowly averted getting in serious trouble.
Now they’ve transplanted the sketch and video presentation they honed on the Boston comedy circuit, the “Great and Secret Comedy Show West,” to their new home in Los Angeles, where it’s become a fixture on Thursday nights at the Improv Comedy Lab in Hollywood.

“Here in Boston, the biggest name you can get on a show is Steve Sweeney,” David said. “There you can get Drew Carey. Everybody is willing to do shows.”