AcroCats: The sure-fire remedy for a sucky week
November 18, 2015 9:27 AM   Subscribe

 
This may be a double, but...

I've seen this act live. It's a lot of fun, and I recommend it.

Even when the cats refuse to do their tricks (which, as you might expect, happens with some frequency), the human showrunners manage to make it funny and entertaining.

Samantha Martin, the ringleader and MC, is either someone I really want to party with, completely insane, or both.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 9:31 AM on November 18, 2015 [6 favorites]


Here is their official site, BTW.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 9:33 AM on November 18, 2015


Saw them live in Baltimore and it was well worth it.
posted by josher71 at 9:33 AM on November 18, 2015


God bless Stephen Colbert for doing what he could. =^._.^=
posted by maryr at 9:34 AM on November 18, 2015 [8 favorites]


josher71, you may have been at the same show as me! I believe they were in town for several nights, though.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 9:35 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


I saw them on one of their last shows, maybe last. It was a Sunday night.
posted by josher71 at 9:45 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


Whatever, this is seriously interesting in the way it balances perfection (OMFG cats doing acrobatics) with utter failure (LOL they're not even doing anything most of the time). It's a new paradigm for performance in the new era of people being kind of fed up with people doing stuff they've practiced for twenty years and everything being so #!*^%ing skilled and wonderful and perfect. I care way more about, like, how do these people even get bookings, and what are their future plans, and could I get my cats to do this kind of half assed circus stuff? Fuck talented humans. I'm all about mediocre cats. Like that feline vocalist rap album from a month ago. It's the future.
posted by mbrock at 9:47 AM on November 18, 2015 [12 favorites]


As a man who is owned by two cats, I really enjoyed seeing this on Colbert. My lovely bride and I agreed that you would get the same result just having a dozen random cats in the vicinity of the equipment.
posted by The Deej at 9:55 AM on November 18, 2015


My favorite trick was when they got the humans to close the carrier and stop bothering them.
posted by Nanukthedog at 9:58 AM on November 18, 2015 [17 favorites]


(LOL they're not even doing anything most of the time)
Yes, even attempting to get cats to do anything is absurd...
But then the cat man in Key West seems to get his cats to do almost everything, including jumping through a flaming hoop..
posted by MtDewd at 10:00 AM on November 18, 2015


I have seen them and they are a joy. It is exactly the sort of barely controlled chaos you would expect, and it's great.
posted by louche mustachio at 10:01 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


One of our cats took to clicker training like this very well. He will roll over, do fancy jumps, stand up, and most importantly sit in one place while we are cooking so we don't trip over him and impale ourselves on a fork. Our other cat can do exactly one thing. She will sit and stare at you and if you are very lucky raise one paw up quizzically.
posted by Bistle at 10:21 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm all about mediocre cats.

They're not mediocre, they just don't care. Which is why I love cats. Sure they could do everything perfectly first time, but I imagine their inner monologue is "Fuck you, pathetic humans. As if I'm lowering myself to your feeble games. Oh fine I'll do this one thing if you'll leave me the hell alone. Ok? Happy now? God!"
posted by billiebee at 10:28 AM on November 18, 2015 [5 favorites]


I saw them live here in Portland a few months ago. It was hilarious, partly because I had no idea whether the joke was that the cats didn't really do tricks, or on me that I ever expected them to.

My favorite parts were when the cats would dart off stage and into the audience, and resulting squeals from random folks who were chosen for visits.
I'm not a cat person by nature, but the show clearly made the vast majority of people in attendance (ages 3-90) deliriously happy, and so in that way, Acrocats are definitely a net positive for the world.
posted by donnagirl at 10:41 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


I saw them 2 years ago in London! TWICE!!

The first night, I just cackled my face off; seriously, my friend and I couldn't stop laughing. Paid about $20 bucks to watch cats do cat things. There was also an unmotivated porcupine, and a crazy chick named Henrietta who played the tambourine. There was a whole RockCats band of kitties playing guitar, keyboards, drums, you name it!

The second night, I dragged my boyfriend; it was even more hilarious! Between us and the senior ladies' group behind us, there was non-stop laughter. Some of the cats were obviously unionized; others took an opportunity to do a few laps under our feet.

Samantha the MC killed us - you could never tell whether she was having fun, or just gritting her teeth behind a smile, willing those darn cats to just do the trick, for Pete's sake. My friend and I stuck around after the show, and totally fangirl'd over the kitties. We got to carry the kitty stars, including Tuna (the show cat) out to the kitty bus!

That's absolutely awesome that they wound up on Colbert's show!

If you ever get the opportunity to see them live, don't miss it!
posted by NorthernAutumn at 11:03 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


This would be both funny and totally worth the price of admission even if the cats never did anything.
posted by chavenet at 11:06 AM on November 18, 2015


At the show I attended, the cats did do plenty of tricks (just not always). They rode carts, walked tightropes, leaped between platforms, rang bells, flipped signs, "played" instruments, and more. The humans sometimes had to coax them a bit, but the cats performed at least 50% of the tricks in some capacity. It wouldn't be a cat circus if the performers did everything the humans wanted :)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 11:21 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


You'd think the cooler the trick, the louder the applause, the more freaked out the cat. Some weird negative feedback loop.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:35 AM on November 18, 2015


They're not mediocre, they just don't care.

This video reminded me of the basset hound we grew up with. Years after he passed I read a ranking of "dog intelligence" that put basset hounds right near the bottom. Our dog didn't come across as particularly stupid - quite clever, sensitive and obedient, in fact - so I was surprised.

Then I noticed that "intelligence" meant something similar to "ease of training." That cleared up everything; our basset was not stupid, he just didn't give a crap about doing tricks for no reason. He was probably smarter than most humans by that metric. Being pragmatically self-willed is not a sign of stupidity.
posted by vanar sena at 11:35 AM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


I apologize for any confusion or hurt feelings caused by my referring to these amazing creatures as "mediocre" which should not be read as an indictment of their talents as feline animals and I am convinced that they are in fact highly skilled at all kinds of amazing things that I suck at like jumping but was only meant as a characterization of their on stage behavior which could be considered "mediocre" from the perspective of a human expecting human levels of giving a shit about performing in front of other humans for money which of course felines cannot reasonably be expected to give a %#!* about and which in fact their very neglect of is itself a charming and all too understandable attitude to be expected from any felines involved in this type of show which is of course human centric in its implied expectations vis a vis performance and choreography and actually raises some interesting questions concerning the nature of circus type exhibitions and their inherent species power dynamics,
posted by mbrock at 11:45 AM on November 18, 2015 [5 favorites]


Yeah, cats are like Janice from Accounting.
posted by The Deej at 11:47 AM on November 18, 2015 [3 favorites]


I apologize for any confusion or hurt feelings caused by my referring to these amazing creatures as "mediocre"...

Oh, don't worry. They'll get payback while you sleep.
posted by mudpuppie at 11:57 AM on November 18, 2015 [1 favorite]


I love a good claw massage.
posted by mbrock at 12:28 PM on November 18, 2015


I have never felt more like a glorious weirdo than when I paid to see the Amazing Acro-Cats and loved the show.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 12:36 PM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


I saw them in Philly. There was a groundhog that wore little hats and raised a flag.

Also, I got there 45 minutes early, so I got to sit front row, center aisle and it was the best choice I made ALL YEAR.
posted by joyceanmachine at 1:01 PM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


Me too! I saw them too! It was awesome.
posted by to recite so charmingly at 2:04 PM on November 18, 2015


The Russians have been doing this for a while.
posted by BWA at 2:05 PM on November 18, 2015


It strikes me as one of the most Sullivan-like acts to grace the stage of the former Ed Sullivan Theater since it was called the Ed Sullivan Theater. (Although some of Letterman's Is This Anything? segments came close too.) This is some straight-up vaudeville shit. Love them cats.

I'm still missing Colbert's old show, though. And I have a feeling I'll only miss it more as we get closer to election day. (He still does political commentary on the new show, but it strikes me as relatively toothless compared to his inspired work as his conservative blowhard character.)

Also, I just noticed the other night that during the new show's credit sequence we see a tiny figure waving an American flag on a rooftop just after the sun goes down. I've never DVR'ed it and frozen the frame to get a better look, but I suspect/hope it may be a shout out to the "Stephen Colbert" character.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 3:20 PM on November 18, 2015 [2 favorites]


This is some straight-up vaudeville shit.

I've been doing some research on a vaudeville family. Until reading a bunch of newspapers from the time, I didn't realize that cat acts were actually fairly common in vaudeville days.

See Professor Techow, 1903 (pdf). Vaudeville shit indeed!
posted by mudpuppie at 3:36 PM on November 18, 2015 [4 favorites]


The difficulty is training the cats to maintain their level of feline indifference night after night. The acrocats show wouldn't be entertaining if the cats just did the trick.
posted by humanfont at 6:52 PM on November 18, 2015


There are so many quotable bits in that Techow interview that I will refrain from just reposting the entire thing and instead tell everyone to go read it. ("All the cats I had trained to this act died insane"! Pretty Persian cats "have grown to be as stupid and inert as so many owls"!)
posted by jaguar at 7:28 PM on November 18, 2015


The Moscow cat circus allegedly does cruel things to their cats. Acro cats comes from a place of positive reinforcement.
posted by Bistle at 7:32 PM on November 18, 2015


« Older Such a story...   |   DeMille's Lost City Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments