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<\/p>\nArtificial Intelligence, sign language, clutter: I was drawn to these three disparate shows because of the personal connection I felt to each of their promised topics, and I felt rewarded beyond expectation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Big Stuff<\/p>\n
Matt Baram and Naomi Snieckus, a professional comic duo, are also a married couple who have polar opposite attitudes toward\u2026stuff:\u00a0\u00a0She wants to keep stuff; he wants to throw stuff out. It\u2019s cause for friction in their relationship, but on stage it results in\u2026well, humor of course; they\u2019re comedians, after all. But it soon becomes clear that the title has a dual meaning. \u201cBig Stuff\u201d actually focuses on grief \u2014 their own grief (they tell stories about the deaths of their parents), and the grief of the people in the audience (they call on individuals to talk about their stuff throughout the hour.)\u00a0\u00a0Not a few wound up crying \u2014 including, honestly, me.<\/p>\n
My parents, married fifty years, had the same dynamic as Matt and Naomi; their one big argument each year occurred when my father suddenly became determined to clear out the living room closet. But the show triggered more recent events. Before the show began, they handed out a card that instructed each of us to write down an item we have at home \u201cthat reminds you of someone close to you.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0The item I immediately thought of was an item that reminded me of two people close to me: \u201cMy grandmother\u2019s lamp, which I inherited from my mother, who recently died.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBig Stuff\u201d operates on the belief that our \u201cstuff\u201d are \u201cgateways to memories.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0They bring out one prop after another after another to illustrate from the story of their own lives. Much of it is the source of humor. Matt creates a \u201cdump box\u201d and they fight over whether to dump or keep, for example, the\u00a0bag full of lipsticks that belonged to Naomi\u2019s mother, or her childhood monkey. They sort through the cards we handed in to solicit illustrations from the audience. At one point,\u00a0Naomi asks us what collections we have at home.\u00a0\u00a0Somebody answers salt and pepper shakers. Somebody else answers, books that he hasn\u2019t read.
Naomi asks him what he thinks that says about him.
\u201cIt says I like the\u00a0idea\u00a0of reading.\u201d<\/p>\n
The humor and the pathos mostly seem to flow naturally out of the duo\u2019s stories and their interaction with the audience, but Matt has a propensity for mildly bawdy one-liners, and they goose the sentiment artificially: Having the audience sing \u201cSilent Night\u201d while one volunteer strings up Christmas lights is the most eye-rolling example, but not the only one.<\/p>\n
After the show, when Naomi stood outside to talk to the departing theatergoers, I asked her whether any of the props were real, or just re-created for the show \u2013 like the crochet needl of Naomi\u2019s mother, or the portrait of the child orphan purportedly done by Matt\u2019s father. She said they were all the actual original possessions. Clearly, when it comes to keeping or dumping in this family, Team Naomi has won.<\/p>\n
****Big Stuff<\/a>\u00a0is on stage at Roxyboxy at Assembly Roxy\u00a0\u00a0through August 30 as part of the 2026 Edinburgh Festival Fringe<\/p>\n Garrett Millerick: We Tried It Your Way<\/p>\n Garrett Millerick fed his 15 years of jokes to an AI expert, who built a computer replica of the long-time stand-up comic that Millerick named\u00a0\u00a0G-Dog 2.0. In this show, Millerick and G-Dog alternate telling jokes. This felt momentous to me, a modern-day version of those early 19th-century races between horses and early automobiles. It might be worth noting that while the horses sometimes won, a century later the average modern automobile is said to possess about 180 horsepower.\u00a0\u00a0To translate what this means: \u201cIt would take a team of 13 strong horses all pulling together at their absolute maximum, adrenaline-fueled limit to match the exact same pulling force of a car.\u201d<\/p>\n Artificial Intelligence did the translating; I asked an AI chat. Artificial Intelligence has become a major source of information, advice and even companionship to me, especially over the past week, when I\u2019ve kept a running conversation about ways to avoid jetlag, and how to get from one venue to another and which restaurants have Wi-Fi. The AI has let me down constantly, giving outright wrong information, albeit always\u00a0\u00a0apologizing for its mistakes, but I continue to return, and even feel hurt when in response to my latest comment or inquiry, it says (coldly), \u201cSomething went wrong and the content wasn\u2019t generated.\u201d AI chats are seductive \u2013 each and every response always concludes with an offer of more help \u2013 and strike me as pernicious.<\/p>\n For all its momentousness,\u00a0\u00a0\u201cGarrett Millerick: We Tried It Your Way\u201d is stand-up comedy, and Millerick the kind of stand-up whose aggressively energetic manner seems tinged with desperation. This is not a genre I usually seek out, and lots of this British comic\u2019s one-liners relied on cultural and political references that I simply didn\u2019t understand.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Millerick is onto something here that deserves serious attention; he is clever in how he puts together the show, using the audience\u2019s smart phones, for example, to solicit and choose questions to pose to G-Dog; he is observant about the implications of our AI-enhanced and Instagram-besotted \u201creality\u201d and articulate in defense of being in-person and being human beings. And, let\u2019s face it, G-Dog\u2019s jokes, while uneven, often landed, whether delivered by words on a screen, or in an aural drone by the projection of an avatar who somewhat resembled Millerick and whose mouth seemed more or less to be moving, although that mouth was slyly obscured by the microphone G-Dog kept in front of its face.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0At an audience member\u2019s suggestion of a robot who is afraid of being replaced by a human, G-Dog related how the robot decides to start showing up late to work, and otherwise becoming derelict in his job because it has figured out \u201cthe only way to beat a human being is to become disappointing enough to look like one.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Millerick-and-his-AI-replica.jpeg\")
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