Pretending Things are A Cock: fell flat but in a funny way

You know how jokes can get kinda tired and end up falling flat? Jokes about cocks tend to do that, but before they do, they’re pretty funny.

Stand-up comedian Jon Bennett has been working on this project, Pretending Things Are a Cock for about the last three years. It started as a Facebook page where he’d post pictures of varied items protruding from his groin area. It became wildly popular so now there’s a book for sale filled with glossy Pretend Cock photos and he has this show going.

The list of objects Bennett employs includes monuments from around the world, strange Australian household items (a door snake?) and religious objects. And yes, it is funny. But even Bennett himself said he’d been doing this for 3 years now, it’s getting a little old. So as the slideshow and running commentary continue through the show it wasn’t a surprise that the real humor wasn’t about the objects protruding from Bennett’s groin, but the stories that the pictures carried with them. The show became more of a comedic travelogue with the Pretend Cock as an excuse to display the photo. The Machu Picchu cock, for example, had the funniest anecdote (nothing to do with a pretend cock) where Bennett veers off a Peruvian mountain trail with a Swede named Tobias and ends up asking himself, “what 28-year-old man poos himself?” Maybe it’s the non-chalant attitude of his delivery, but it seemed to me that lately Bennett’s been asking himself, what 28 year old man pretends random objects are his cock?

The answer is a funny one. Even though the Pretend Cocks didn’t pack the punch they were intended to, or perhaps once did, Bennett is funny enough to make the show a good one.

Pretending Things are A Cock is on as part of the Vancouver Fringe. For more information go here.