By Shelby
I’ll admit it. I am a sucker for Christmas. Usually I’ve got my decorations up by Black Friday, and I’m usually listening to Christmas music by then, too. There are a few Christmas movies (A Christmas Story, Meet Me in St. Louis, It’s a Wonderful Life and Love Actually) that I watch like clockwork every year, and a dozen or so others that I rotate through (Die Hard and Home Alone, for example) regularly. I just love all the twinkle lights and the green trees and pretty much everything about Christmas. That being said, I also love laughing about Christmas. As far as I’m concerned, Bad Santa might be the most ingenious holiday movie ever, because just like pecan pie, it’s the perfect mixture of salty and sweet.
The Master Pancake Theatre Christmas Show at the Alamo Drafthouse Ritz may be more on the salty side than the sweet, but either way, it’s the best Christmas treat I’ve had this year. For those of you unversed in the Master Pancake Theatre Signature Series, basically you take three very funny guys (John Erler, Joe Parsons and Owen Egerton), give them mics and let them mock everything that comes across on screen. It began under the name Mr. Sinus Theatre and was similar to Mystery Science Theater 3000 in theme, but evolved to include two new cast members and a new name. Typically the Master Pancake crew puts their formidable gifts for mockery to use on full-length movies, but for Christmas, they decided to “channel surf,” as they say many families who have nothing to say to each other on Christmas are apt to do. They click through everything like animation, claymation, music videos, movies and variety specials drudging up more ridiculous holiday dreck than you could possibly imagine exists. And they make it all hysterically funny. Seriously, I think I nearly lost my voice because I laughed so hard. And they even made me laugh when they took potshots at my favorite of the Rankin and Bass holiday specials, “Nestor, the Long-Eared Donkey.”
The show lasts about two hours and also includes milk and cookies, live improvised caroling and (at the showing I attended) grown men in their underwear parading around on stage.
So, if you, like me, have heard MAGIC 95.5 play “The Christmas Shoes” for the thousandth time and can’t help but laugh at the inanity of the lyrics, then you absolutely MUST attend the Master Pancake Theatre Christmas Show to see them make fun of clips of not only the “The Christmas Shoes” music video, but the made-for-television movie starring Rob Lowe and his particular brand of smell-the-fart acting. It’s too good to pass up.
The Master Pancake Theatre Christmas Show has four more performances before Christmas. Most, if not all, of the shows sell out ahead of time, so check here for tickets for the 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. showings on Dec. 18 and 19.
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