I don't know about you, but I've never seen a chinchilla before. Because of this, I've also never seen a chinchilla at a comedy show before.
Charlie Sosnick thinks they're horrible. “Closer to a rat than a dog," he says, showing me a picture of one. And Charlie would know. He and his comedy partner Michael Kandel have been working closely with chinchillas – along with a host of other animals – for years now as part of their experimental comedy show, Petting Zoo, which is coming to Edinburgh Fringe this August.
The premise of the show is simple. It’s live comedy with live animals – from “silkie chickens,” (a real breed and not just a well-groomed bird) to geckos and tarantulas. Each night, they invite stand-up comedians on stage to perform their set while holding an animal, or at least while trying to. They recently hosted Fringe legend Cat Cohen, who didn't escape her encounter with a ferret unscathed.
“Snake is back on the menu” for Fringe, Michael tells me. Their first time performing in the UK, Charlie says“It’s going to be crazy…It’s a rite of passage as a comedian”.
“Rabbits, tegus, bearded dragons, geckos, owls, frogs, tortoises and turtles,” Charlie says, are on their way from a local reptile zoo.
The animal handlers will be driving “like mad men” in and out of Edinburgh every single night for 20 days to deliver the animals they need for the show.
Once the props-cum-stand-up partners get backstage, they’re shared between comedians. “We have a bit of a sorting stage pre-show,” Michael explains, “because some people are more scared of animals than others, so you really don’t want to scare people”. They sound sympathetic, but there's a glint of child-like glee in Charlie’s eyes as he tells me: “lots of people don’t realise that they’re afraid of animals until they’re in the room with one”.
Do people get scared? Of course. “We’ve never let anyone refuse, though,” Charlie says. Often, the fear doesn’t kick in until the comics are on stage. “Our friend got a ferret once,” Michael laughs. Charlie jumps in. “He froze up,” he remembers. “He was, like, paralysed with fear”.
Strangely, it’s this fear that makes the show such a success. Beyond the simple excitement the pair get from working with wild animals, there’s a philosophy to their comedy. “The main thing that’s really cool about it,” Charlie explains, “is that you really see good comedians struggling”. “So you sort of see the mask come off, and you start to see what’s prepared material and what’s the real human underneath struggling with a chinchilla getting in their clothes”.
Sosnick and Kandel will be performing for 20 nights in August at Fringe in the neo-gothic mini-castle that is the Gilded Balloon alongside a professional wildlife educator, who is on hand to give facts about the animals and ensure proper handling.
“I’m sure by the end of Fringe, you get a lot of comedians who are a little bit phoned in,” says Charlie. “But I think it’s impossible to phone it in and not be super present when you’re also trying to handle an animal”.
Finding “the line between the person and the comedian,” as Charlie puts it, wasn’t necessarily their intention when they started hosting the show. They were just looking for a hook. “No one knew who we were in New York,” Charlie explains, and before Covid, there were dozens of comedy shows being performed every night. It was hard enough to get traction, and, Charlie admits, they weren’t really very good. “Yet,” he makes clear.
“We needed to get someone who wasn’t my mum feeling bad for me to fill up seats,” says Charlie. “So this is what we came up with”.
Kandel and Sosnick didn’t expect their show to be such a success – in fact, they thought it would crash and burn, and were ready to get straight back to the drawing board.
But they haven’t needed to. Countless sold-out New York shows later, with a quick break in the pandemic, they’re going from strength to strength – with just a few furry and animal-shaped road bumps. From a dove laying an egg backstage, to a comedian leaving her set “wrecked” by a ferret with particularly sharp claws, the animals don’t always make life easy.
In fact, the animals can steal the show – it’s tough to regain momentum when a dove has flown into the audience and landed on someone’s head. But that’s the “miracle of life,” Michael says. It’s just a slight shame when the animal is more interesting than whatever you have to say.
Of course, when it comes to working with wildlife, there’s one thing that’s almost guaranteed to go wrong (or right, depending on whether your aim is a clean set or disgusting your audience). “Pooping is our bread and butter,” says Charlie. “That’s the best thing that can happen”.
It doesn’t sound particularly fun (Charlie tells me about a time he got “absolutely squirted on by a skunk” and I can’t help but squirm), but the pair’s child-like enthusiasm is infectious. “It’s pretty spectacular,” Charlie says of the “constant metronomic stream of poop” which a chinchilla can produce. The furry rat-slash-dog doesn’t look so cute now, I admit.
Their show is kind of thing my little brother would have thought up, and I mean that as the highest of compliments. One of Charlie’s favourite things about the show is that he gets to torture his mum. “She hates all these things and so it’s awesome to just put a snake right in her face and ruin her night and make her miserable,” he says, grinning.
Those are their favourite kind of audience members, they say. “People who are terrified”.
If you want to be terrified, too, Michael Kandel and Charlie Sosnick’s Petting Zoo will be at Fringe from August 2nd - 20th, at Venue 14 (Gilded Balloon Teviot – Sportsmans)
