How I Met Your Brother

Benjamin Stevenson (one half of The Stevenson Experience) is in the middle of rehearsing in Canberra for the 2013 Canberra Comedy Festival – one day after finishing up in Adelaide, and a week before opening his show in Melbourne. Comedians, it turns out, are in high demand this time of year. The Stevenson Experience are a comic duo that perform one part stand-up, one part musical comedy and one part two-brothers-annoying-each-other-on-stage. As Benjamin puts it: “It's me and my identical twin brother, and we're a musical comedy duo, kind of like Flight Of The Conchords or Tripod. It's a lot of fun, and we're really well known for our audience interaction.” And the audience loves it. The style that The Stevenson Experience brings to the stage is not unfamiliar to lovers of musical stand-up, but the ease with which the twins interact with each other and the audience make them stand out from many other comic performers. The show is about 50/50 scripted and reactive, and sometimes the brothers will just go out of their way to annoy each other as much as possible.

“Our rapport on stage is very natural,” Benjamin explains. “We'll take arguments we had at home and script it into the show, so it's all very natural. And we can also kind of vibe out what each other is going to say. And it comes across as a very smooth and relaxed atmosphere of the show.” And, it seems, cheeky. In one recent show James (“the less attractive one”) decided to bring a squirt bottle on stage and spent the performance annoying Benjamin with it. It's this sort of irreverence that makes a show like How I Met Your Brother stand out from the crowd, and means as an audience we can be assured of well scripted and rehearsed routines mixed with natural interactions and hilarious fun times. The chatty parts come between and in the middle of the singing, and it is first and foremost a comedy act, with the songs being a vehicle for its delivery.

The show that we're all looking forward to is about these twins leaving behind their careers as highly qualified engineers and going into the comedy circuit. They track their relationship as brothers and the chasing of this new career. Sounds like a mid-life crisis, but these talented lads are only just pushing their early 20s, as Benjamin is quick to note: “We started quite young, and we just really loved it so we kept doing it and we got better and better. We've been doing it for about five years, and this is the first year we're doing it full time.” And if you're going to dive head first into this sort of career, why not make a show of it? With seasoned performers such as these two, the show is bound to be fun, vibrant and full of energy. Plus, Benjamin has promised to get James back for that bottle squirting incident…

WHEN & WHERE: Thursday 28 March to Sunday 21 April, Trades Hall, Evatt Room