That Would Be Even Funnier With Helmets and Tiny Heels

The Money Kids spin everyday nonsense into over-the-top funny business.

Lauren Lapkus and Candy Lawrence

Jason Creps

By Kelly McClure

January 31, 2008

O.I.N.K! featuring Dan Telfer, LMDF, Money Kids, and Tin Sandwich
Wed 2/6, 10 PM, Playground Theater, 3209 N. Halsted, 773-871-3793 or the-playground.com, $5.
Money Kids, Jessica Halem, Jena Friedman, and others
Thu-Fri 2/14-2/15, 9 PM, Lincoln Lodge at the Lincoln Restaurant, 4008 N. Lincoln, 773-251-1539 or thelincolnlodge.com, $10.

It’s the last night of Chicago SketchFest, and a blond woman in the front row of a packed auditorium in the Theatre Building is killing time before the next set, e-mailing someone on her BlackBerry. As she punches away at the keys, the room goes dark and two stage lights begin to flicker in time to Madonna’s “Vogue.”

Candy Lawrence and Lauren Lapkus step out from opposite sides of the stage, wearing matching fake buck teeth and T-shirts with a picture of themselves sitting on side-by-side toilets. They make a beeline for the front row, gyrating right in the face of the blond woman, who is no longer messing with her phone but looking awkwardly around the room like, um, what’s happening? The girls continue past her, dancing from seat to seat, and the crowd ripples with laughter. Jumping back up on the stage like they’re jumping onto a couch, they introduce themselves as the Money Kids and mug for the crowd as they announce the title of the show: “Oh What, This Ol’ Show?”

The lights dim again, and when they come back up Lapkus and Lawrence are walking toward the stage from the back of the room, acting out a date that’s coming to an end. Lapkus, who plays the girl, invites Lawrence to come in for a drink. She excuses herself through the back curtain to slip into something more comfortable and comes back out wearing a black light-up wig, Coke-bottle glasses, and a prison uniform. She’s got a Freddy Krueger glove on one hand and starts caressing Lawrence’s face with a plastic gun. The blond woman is now laughing so hard it sounds like she might injure herself.

Lawrence, 27, and Lapkus, 22, formed the Money Kids just about a year ago, in November 2006, but they’ve attracted attention fast. Earlier this month they performed at a showcase of up-and-coming local acts for scouts from comedy festivals, including Montreal’s Just for Laughs. Matt Barbera, president of the Playground Theater—a nonprofit co-op with a mission to teach and promote improv comedy—booked the six acts on the bill. Last year three groups at a similar showcase were picked for the HBO Aspen Comedy Festival. Barbera thinks the Money Kids impressed the scouts. It’s not so much that they’re writing groundbreaking material, he says. “They are just amazing performers. You can’t help but watch them and they’re naturally stage charismatic.”

Lawrence and Lapkus met in 2005, when they both joined an all-female improv ensemble, the MISSfits, at the Playground. When the group disbanded about a year and a half later, the two decided it was time to come up with something of their own—and though they hadn’t spent much time together outside the group, they also decided to move in together. They found an apartment in Lakeview (with a view of the lake, even) and within a month they’d lined up their first gig.

Alana Johnston, who was in the MISSfits with Lawrence and Lapkus, says she was immediately drawn to what they were doing. “We would all be hanging at their house and they’d start riffing about anything, laughing their faces off, and the next thing you know they’d be up onstage doing just that—but with helmets and tiny heels.” She’s referring to a skit based on a video the women made, where they fight boredom by putting on children’s plastic high-heeled shoes, doing shots of booze, and threatening to shoot each other in the face. “They each keep a pair of tiny heels outside their bedroom doors, like princesses,” Johnston says. “It’s hilarious.”

As roommates, Lapkus and Lawrence pretty much develop material 24/7. But they never sit down and say “OK, it’s time to work on those scenes now,” says Lawrence—comedy just happens. “It happens all day long,” Lawrence elaborates. “It’s more like, ‘Oh my god, did you see that? That was funny. Write that down.’” Then they play with those ideas onstage until they turn into things that can be done over and over again.

“We’ll come up with a basic idea of a skit we want to do, and then we’ll come up with a character and create the scene from that,” says Lapkus. “It’ll be a random phrase or something and then we create sketches from that. For example, we came up with ‘a narcoleptic woman who goes on a power walk,’ then we developed a skit from that.”

They don’t rehearse a new premise much before trying it out on an audience—Lapkus says they like getting immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t. But they don’t always abide by what the crowd tells them. “If we’re having fun with it, we’re gonna do it regardless if the audience thinks it’s funny or not,” Lawrence says. “We think it’s funny when the audience doesn’t laugh, we’re like, pffft!”

Lapkus, who grew up in Evanston, started taking classes at ImprovOlympic (now iO) while she was still in high school. She’s now a senior at DePaul, where she studies English, and performs as part of two iO comedy teams, the Darned and FELT, a troupe that uses puppets.

Lawrence, who’s from Middletown, New York, studied theater at Niagara University. After graduation she got an apartment in Buffalo and traveled more than an hour each way to take classes at Second City in Toronto. But the long commute took it out of her, and she moved to Chicago three years ago to immerse herself in the comedy scene, taking classes at iO and performing in a Playground group called Project Sunshine. To pay the bills she works in the office at the Briar Street Theatre, home of the local Blue Man Group franchise—taking tickets, answering phones, making popcorn, and the like.

Chicago was good for Lawrence, but it got great when she met Lapkus. “She was one of my favorite people in the MISSfits,” she says. “We both do a lot of character work and we gravitated to each other onstage,” she says. “We pretty much have the same style of comedy.”

A Money Kids set, which usually runs about 20 minutes, is a heaping handful of everyday weirdness cranked up to ten. They might make fun of fat kids, Brits, or Sex in the City; they sprinkle in bodily noises wherever possible and are prone to random acts of dance. “Anything weird we see, we’re gonna try to make a bit about it,” Lapkus says.

When I ask them if there’s anything they wouldn’t make a bit about, they have to ponder the question. “I was thinking AIDS,” Lawrence says. “But no, we’d probably put that in. We’re not that offensive though, and I think we appeal to a lot of people. So probably leukemia is as far as we’d go.”

They used to do a bit, Lapkus explains, where Lawrence played a clown entertaining a roomful of terminally ill children: “She came in and was doing really horrible and offensive jokes, and I was a kid with leukemia. Eventually I die at the end. We got sick of doing it and were like, ‘Why are people still laughing at this?’ So we cut it. When we don’t invest fully in an idea, then it sucks.”   v

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