Last week, I attended Six Figure Success at the Old Fire Station, ostensibly a training conference for the top sellers of Douche Industries’ (it’s pronounced ‘doo-shay’, after the company’s late founder Robert Douche) essential oils. The purported health benefits of said oils are, due to legal reasons, “for entertainment purposes only”.
Of course, the evening was actually the latest work from Krage Brown and Thom Munden's innovative production company Everybody Panic, and starred prolific Oxford comedy duo Nathan Peter Grassi and Ida Berglöw Kenneway.
Kenneway plays Douche’s loyal widow, in a tailored Barbie-pink dress, grinning with a faux-harmless professional sheen (think Carole Baskin - in fact, think of Tiger King to conjure the unhinged nature of the show throughout). Grassi, meanwhile, plays the corporation’s extremely dubious and preening resident scientist, dressed in a lab coat thrown over a flashy leopard print shirt and gaudy watch. They appear initially chummy, but there are clearly years of resentment and rivalry bubbling underneath the surface. Throughout the evening, Douche is pressured by her colleague to sample the latest line of products, to her increasing detriment and peril.
If you’ve ever seen a documentary on the subject, you’ll know that the seemingly preposterous levels of greed and flippancy on show here aren’t particularly exaggerated. LaLaRich, an Amazon documentary series on US MLM LuLaRoe, features founders just as wild and heinous as the characters on display here, who managed to flog their hideous patterned leggings as a billion-dollar business via thousands of victimised recruits, most of them suburban mothers.
Multi-level marketing schemes, or MLMs, for those who need a refresher, work like this: The founder has a business, selling items directly to the customer. Instead of selling via retail, they hire you as a distributor to sell the product for them. You then purchase your inventory from them. While you get to keep most of the money from the sales, the founder takes a percentage of your overall earnings. You then recruit more distributors, sell them your stock, make money off of those sales, and take a percentage of their ongoing earnings, as does the company. And so on.
If the product you are selling is trendy and crucially, you’ve gotten in early, your MLM can make you a fantastic salary. For the vast majority of distributors involved, it can be financially ruinous. To make ends meet, the pressure is put on distributors to prioritise recruiting more workers beneath them by any means necessary. Organisations often spiral into cult-like belief systems, with the lucky few at the top preaching a disingenuous gospel of hard work and self-belief to later recruits.
This sounds like it could result in a much darker and more embittered show than what’s actually on offer. Everybody Panic uses its concept more as a sandbox for zany shenanigans than as a biting commentary. The humour is fearless and off-kilter from the start, with jokes about animal testing, gross-out gags about the side effects of the products, and zany, impressively produced infomercials shown on an overhead monitor all working far better than they have any right to.
Neither of our main characters is remotely sane or sympathetic, which is very intentional. The crowd plays the straight-man here, in a series of creative and genuinely hilarious audience participation segments. There is a mock-cooking show, talk show, sampling of new products, quickfire political candidate questioning, and a “Douche of the Year” award (the winner got a bouquet). Kenneway and Grassi excelled at building comedy around the varying levels of comfort their volunteers felt. There was also an audience plant, employed cleverly amongst all the semi-willing volunteers.
I doubt Six Figure Success would work even half as well with less charismatic performers, and the cartoony acting and (at times) broad jokes could have easily curdled into something stilted and cringe-inducing. But here, the gamble paid off: it was a riotously silly and endlessly creative night out.