Amuse bouche

Blue Whale shorts are a tasty aperitif

Blue Whale Comedy Festival will open its three-day laughaganza with a slate of absurdist shorts on the big Green—an episodic appetizer to Harold Ramis’s hysterical, borderline demented, 1980 golf comedy entrée, “Caddyshack.”

David Nofire, the Circle Cinema’s long-time resident programmer of all things geek (he currently curates the Graveyard Shift series of films, as well as the perennial, long-running genre-themed lockdown, Slumber Party) was enlisted by BWCF to help cull a bevy of domestic and international submissions.

“We came to an easy agreement on the films we thought were the best for this fest,” Nofire said.

The selections are nothing if not inventive and diverse.

“Tom, the Knife Salesman,” from director Ryan Brown, finds a hapless door-to-door peddler trapped with a couple of Jehovah’s Witnesses—captives of a paranoid, gun-toting homeowner whose “No Solicitors” sign means business.

“Stowaway,” by Kenneth Anderson, involves a gullible blonde falling for a horny sailor whose promises are not what they seem. Honestly, it’s problematic, though it lands its snort-worthy joke like a ribald chain e-mail from your septuagenarian, misogynistic uncle.    

“Take a Stand, Man,” directed by and starring John Wu, is the ideological answer to “Stowaway”—a satirical statement on reality TV and political correctness, framed by a bad date and keenly aware of its sexual politics.

So grab your humans, non-humans, blankets, and hors d’oeuvres. It’s a Thursday on the Green and the weather will be fine. You were going to do it anyway.

Short Film Festival & “Caddyshack”
Thurs., Sept. 7 | 8:30 p.m. | Guthrie Green