Raspyni Brothers
March 18th, 2008 Posted in Comedy, NoveltyAnyone who attended the exciting showcase at iacep’s 2007 annual convention at Green Valley Ranch & Resort in Las Vegas is already fully aware of the astounding skill and razor sharp wit of The Raspyni Brothers. For those of you not familiar with this outstanding act, consider that the Raspyini’s are one of the most successful comedy juggling duos there is. As supporting acts for such headliners as Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Dana Carvey, George Burns, Tom Jones, Jay Leno, Patti Labelle, Tony Bennett and Howie Mandell, they
have been making America’s audiences laugh for over 20 years. Barry Friedman and Dan Holzman as the Raspyni Brothers have also been entertaining top corporate clients like Amazon and Google in that time as well.
When it comes to the specialized needs of special clients in the corporate market, no one does it better than these guys. With a wealth of experience and completely disarming attitudes to match, Barry and Dan are just the kind of guys you want to work with for your next event. Dan, the ever eloquent and often hilariously deadpan half of the duo concisely sets the hook for the average planner. “I’d sum it up in one word, ‘Customization’ my friend.’” “That’s three words,” Barry interjects. As if nothing at all happened, Dan continues. “Yes, customization, it’s all about working the client’s information into a comedy extravaganza,” he finishes in his sort of big-top game show announcer fashion, though he appears completely serious about it. And in this case, he is. Barry reiterates: “That is something that we are really big on. In fact, when we do shows where there are no clients, it never works out so well. In all seriousness though, we really like taking apart companies and having fun with their message, and we work a lot of comedy around that.”
The Raspyni’s are excellent jugglers and have won much acclaim and many awards for these skills, but that’s not really what this show is about. What your audience will remember about the Brothers won’t be how many knives they juggled around someone’s head, but just how hard everyone was laughing while they were doing it. Dan says, “We have a lot of great juggling and other tricks we do throughout the show and a lot of them include audience participation. There are bullwhips, machetes, knives, and ping-pong balls, perhaps the most dangerous props of all. These are all things we use audience members for.” “The variable of real people is what makes it all really fun,” Barry adds.
Barry and Dan met in 1980 and started working together in ’82. “We were very young at the time,” Barry explains. “I think a lot of the time we would show up to gigs and people would be surprised at how young we were. Even now people hear in our credits that we have been together for almost twenty five years and we show up still in our early forties.”
The two learned to juggle independently as youths, and met through juggling clubs and conventions. “We met at a convention in Fargo, ND,” Dan says. “Yeah, what a perfectly auspicious location for us to meet.” Barry interjects.
From there, the two jumped into an unusual and tough situation for any performers; outdoor renaissance fairs. “We used to do them in the summers when we first started, and they were a great training ground for our future act. We would do six or seven shows a day and there were a lot of difficult factors weighing in. It was outside, hot, people were
drunk, sometimes it would be rainy or windy, everything which is out of your control. Also, we had to wear tights.”
This was the proving ground where Barry and Dan developed their improvisational style, which to this day has been the key to their flexibility and success in the corporate market. “When we did that many shows a day for such a difficult crowds, we really had to go over the top to make sure we kept their attention. No one was there paying to see us, they were there for the festival, so we had to work hard to hold a crowd. This isn’t entirely different from a corporate engagement, where it isn’t uncommon for something besides our act to be the center of attention, or perhaps nothing at all and people are just mingling. Sometimes people may not even be aware we are there until we are on stage or in front of them on a trade show floor. So, we have to win them over quick, keep their interest and end with them really liking us. At the renaissance fairs that was especially important, because we were working mostly for tips.”
Eventually the guys got out of the renaissance market and into something a little bit more conducive to a professional performer. “We got into doing a lot of Las Vegas review shows. It worked okay for a while, but it ended up being too restrictive for us. Most of these places wanted us to do several 12-minute shows a night, six nights a week, which ended up being way too much like a real job for our tastes. We could never really stretch or experiment or try anything new with an audience we had already warmed up because by that time the show was over.”
Barry expounds upon the point. “We had come from an environment where we had absolutely no restrictions in doing these renaissance fairs,” he says, “into a setting where our whole act became basically canned and condensed, like the soup. So we didn’t last too long doing those, but while we did we played Vegas, Atlantic City, Aruba, Lake Tahoe and a number of other review locations.”
That’s about when promoters at the review shows started to take notice not only of their amazing juggling talents, but also their uncanny ability to truly entertain a crowd. “People started to use us as an opening act for everybody. We opened for Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Dean Martin, Tom Jones, and on and on.” Dan adds, “I think it was around then that we also appeared on the ‘Tonight Show’, which was a chance for the stand-up comedian’s management teams to see us. They realized that we really were a funny variety act, which meant that we weren’t using topical material like a stand-up. If any comedians wanted to book us as an opener, we were funny and got the crowd warmed up, but we also weren’t stepping on their toes.”
Dan once again relates an instance of previous experience directly preparing them for the climate of corporate entertainment production. “In that environment, we don’t have to deal with any political or sexual or ethnic humor that may not sit right with corporate groups.” Barry says, “A lot of that kind of material may have the benefit of being 
potentially very funny, but it also has a good chance of putting people off. We can avoid that, as a sort of self-contained sitcom, being able to customize every show within the framework the clients are interested in seeing.”
A lot of entertainers want to do corporate work, including hordes of variety entertainers. Unfortunately it seems that a vast majority of them are grossly under qualified for the task. Jugglers and ventriloquists seem to be the most daunting genres in a meeting planner’s quest for a quality act and this is a problem in two ways. Not only does the planner have to search that much harder, but it makes it all the more difficult for truly entertaining acts like the Raspyni Brothers to get the credibility they deserve.
Thankfully they are here and available for the corporate market. It was the same dogged determination that helped them originally hone their act into something great that also made them interested in corporate work. Always looking to be sharper and better, these audiences presented a unique set of challenges to Barry and Dan. “I think the first the we did in the market was during the time we were doing a lot of fairs and opening acts,” Barry says. “The guy who was managing us at the time found a date for us with Thrifty Drug Store, I believe. We emceed a small conference for them and it was just a very different experience for us to be inside with a group that wasn’t expecting to see a show and had no idea who we were.” Despite this, the Raspyni’s didn’t disappoint. “We did really well, I was actually very surprised and we got paid more than we probably ever had been before. From there we really focused our energy on corporate clients, which was around 1988 or so. Things took off fairly quickly for us, as a lot of people weren’t in the corporate market back then. It was much easier to get booked, unlike today (laughs).”
But, as we alluded to before, not everything is always a walk in the park. “I think Dan and I always seem to enjoy a challenge. We did at the renaissance festivals and fairs and there are a lot of challenges that come into performing a really great show for the corporate audience, which is really such a specialized crowd. We get people from all walks of life that at any given time may have this one thing (their group or job) in common. For a comedian, that is just a goldmine. For everyone to have such a solid common denominator that we can pick into and have fun with is very challenging, but it is so rewarding because the crowds just enjoy the show so much. They have been in meetings, some of them are there under stress, so when we can make them laugh for an hour and make them truly feel like we are talking to them, and it’s a great feeling.”
In addition to the points Barry made about new and unfamiliar audiences for every performance, Dan points out a few other factors unique to the corporate arena. “There is a lot of variety within the context of corporate entertainment. We do trade shows, emcee
work, will break up sessions, anything. What this adds up to is a fairly small portion of our shows actually being headline performances. We pride ourselves on the ability to be flexible and fit into lots of different corporate scenarios. That has helped us maintain a sort of consistency in the corporate field. If trade shows aren’t as prevalent, we will do something else. We have done four-day conferences and we have always been able to keep coming back with new things.”
Again we hit on a vitally important point for corporate meeting planner to bear in mind; you’ve found a great act, used them and everything went off swimmingly, but what the heck do you do next year for the same audience? “Sometimes when people think of juggling, they think it is just one thing. You throw stuff around, toss in a couple of stock lines and do the same thing next time you are on stage. We are not that at all, that’s why we prefer to think of ourselves more as variety artists, because we have a huge repertoire of material and not all of it is juggling-based; most of it is comedy-based.”
“There was one client we served at a four-day conference four years in a row,” Barry says. “That is a tough one to pull off.” “And we never repeated material,” says Dan, “So they were happy with that. In fact they thought that the fourth year was actually the best.” If that doesn’t drive home the point, nothing could.
The Raspyni Brothers will write an entire show for your audience. They can include a portion that is customized, or they can walk in ready to go whenever you want them. You decide. They were schooled in the art of comedy opening for some of the most renowned acts in the world, make the dangerous look easy (but not too easy), have a wealth of experience and will know just what the doctor ordered for your group. All you have to do is tell them, they’ll listen, honest, and you’ll be the hero of the event, once the show is over and everyone can breath again.
BOOK IT!
Key Artist Group
1-866-666-8436.