Slovin & Allen

Eric Slovin and Leo Allen do not do banter. When they take the stage, they look like a standard comedy duo in street clothes, but they operate more like a skipping record. They lock into tightly scripted, escalating loops. In their most famous bit, they repeat the exact same mundane interaction, involving a snack cake and a sports drink, over and over. They run it backwards, try it in different accents, and perform it at double speed until the sheer repetition forces the room to give in. They refuse to wink. They perform absolute nonsense with the flat, serious affect of two men reading a technical manual.

They are ghosts of the early-2000s alternative comedy scene. You cannot buy a ticket to see them today. They exist primarily in the memories of comedy fans and in ripped files of their 2001 Comedy Central Presents half-hour. They represent a specific moment in downtown New York, when basement rooms allowed performers to blur the boundary between a traditional standup set and a weird sketch.

They never break. Whether they are playing bored businessmen whose seminar devolves into drug use, or just rapidly shouting faux-vaudeville non sequiturs, they never ask the crowd for permission to be strange. The duo eventually stopped performing together to write for Saturday Night Live, taking those strange loops off the stage and into the writers’ room.