Comedy Bang! Bang! Live In Vancouver, BC 2016

“I feel like I’m sitting on the toilet,” Scott Aukerman says, perched on one of the tiny, low stools at the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver. It’s May 26, 2016, the last night of a three-week Comedy Bang! Bang! tour that crisscrossed the country with the same core cast at every show: Paul F. Tompkins, Lauren Lapkus, and Scott himself, plus a rotating set of openers and guests. The episode is bittersweet — the end of a run that left them “slowly losing our minds” — and it captures the particular energy of a live show where performers are both exhausted and loose, ready to let the chaos run.

The Naughty Elf and the Jolly Boss

The first character to take the stage is Hoho (Lauren Lapkus), a self-described “naughty elf” who works for Santa Claus. Hoho is an opposite person — she says she hates you when she means she loves you — and she delivers weapons to bad little boys and girls on Christmas morning: guns, knives, Death Stars. She buys them on the black market from smugglers. She also claims she and Santa are shooting a reboot of Punky Brewster for TV, because Santa feels the Coca-Cola image of himself is inaccurate. (“He’s very profane himself,” Hoho explains.) In the show, Hoho plays Punky, and Santa plays himself. The pilot’s plot, as Hoho describes it, involves a hot babysitter who fixes cars and then has sex with Santa, with full nudity — including Hoho, who is not even