âI was listening to The Specials,â Shelley McLendon says over email. âAnd the song âGhost Townâ came on.â That was all it took to set her and Michael Fetters on the path to a sketch comedy show set in an Old West town full of gold rushers, ghost hunters, and church kids.
Regular Mercury readers will know I love screaming about the Aces: the imaginative, reliably hilarious duo composed of McLendon and Fetters. Though they are most notably beloved for their animal impressions, the secret sauce that makes the Aces so outrageous is a hard recipe to reverse engineer.
McLendonâs nigh legendary deadpan humor figures heavily. There was a sketch in the Acesâ 2018 show, Hot Fruit, where everything she picked up was a banana (phone, cigarettes, baby, boat, etc.), and when the audience turned to see the Aces longtime helper Marshall Bradley standing stoically in a human-sized banana costume, Shelley said, âOh, the moon is out.â Iâm still laughing about it, two years later.
Fetters brings total devotion to the physicality of his characters, be they the angry gorilla dad from their sketch about gorilla parentingâwhich is what made people so obsessed with the Acesâ animal impressions in the first placeâto his mysterious all-knowing buffalo chew at their 2019 show State Fair. âAt this point,â McLendon says. âI donât think we can ever NOT play animals in a show.â
So Ghost Town will have an animal or two. Iâve also heard tell of a strongman costume and a petting zoo. It seems impractical to imagine an evening of Aces comedy without a visit from Glenn and Peaches, Fetters and McLendonâs hip socialite swinger characters, but Iâm not sure how they would get to the Old West. McLendon gave me a negative on Ghost Town featuring any giant mechanical spiders Ă la the 1999 film Wild Wild West. âBut,â she said, âyouâre making me think we should.â
A full show is my ideal way for people to see the Acesâas opposed to catching them at festivals or âBest Ofâ nights where they might only get to do one skit. Thereâs a building, rolling humor to their writing, which circles back and pumps up old jokes, adding layers and calling in old references. Ghost Town is set to dip back and forth between a small dusty townâs booming past and its abandoned present. Iâm excited to see where the Aces will take us.