‘Chris and Mauricio Have… QUESTIONS?’ Review by Alice Russo
★★★★
Double act Chris Groves and Mauricio Lombardi bring Chris and Mauricio Have… QUESTIONS? to the Barcelona Fringe Festival, a slight variation on their regular two-man show Two Shades of Grey. In typical Chris and Mauricio style, the show evades standard labels but can be thought of as something between a chat show and improvised stand-up comedy.
Chris Groves is sometimes called Barcelona’s comedy daddy, having helped get the now-thriving scene off the ground. He also founded Secret Comedy Club, a funky underground venue in the heart of Raval that hosts weird and wonderful multilingual shows. Not only that, but Chris is also the creator of the Find Your Funny course, which has trained some of the city’s most successful emerging comedians. Mauricio, with over 15 years of comedy and acting experience, joined him as a coach in 2023. The two then started doing shows together, naturally bouncing off one another with their dysfunctional uncle and nephew dynamic.
On paper, CAMHQ (a catchy acronym for the show’s title) is structured around random questions that the pair haven’t seen before the show; however, its trajectory is better described by Chris at its outset: “We don’t know what the f–k is gonna happen.” He and Mauricio are masters of the loose show scaffold, probing the audience’s lives and minds to generate content. The pair use tangents upon tangents upon tangents to generate fresh and absurd material; not even their most dedicated fans hear a joke they’ve heard before. Simple icebreakers like, “What is your name?” and, “What do you do?” are delivered to us by Chris with an ironic parental condescension. This elevates the show into the realm of parody; we are the wide-eyed toddlers and the hosts are our daddies holding our hands as they lead us into the unknown. A charming quirk of the show is its custom digital content. Our childlike wonder delights at the show’s personal touches, including a custom AI-generated theme song and dance which is reminiscent of a toddlers’ cartoon.
Show hosts almost always interact with the audience, but it’s usually cursory—a task about as routine as setting up the microphone. Chris and Mauricio are no such hosts. These two are deeply and genuinely curious about their audience’s lives, transforming dull facts about everyday people into quick punchlines and theatrical spectacles. Clever digs and puns come to Chris as effortlessly as breathing; a fleeting facial expression directed across the room makes us feel like we’re always in on the joke. Mauricio is Chris’s slapstick counterpart—the Costello to his Abbott. We are treated to full-body re-enactments with Chris watching on in bemusement, from hotel guests relieving themselves in the lobby to a method of COVID self-diagnosis using one’s own flatulence.
CAMHQ is what it says on the label: spontaneous, unpredictable, and surprising. Thanks to the effort Chris and Mauricio exert in personalising the show to each audience member, we leave feeling deeply and intimately connected and cared for. We are not the same people we were when we came in. And besides, if the show’s not your cup of tea, come anyway—The Secret Comedy Club is the only venue in Barcelona with a water feature (it’s actually a ceiling leak, but Chris is just a glass-half-full kind of guy).
This review of Chris and Mauricio Have … QUESTIONS?, performed by Chris Groves and Mauricio Lombardi, was based on their Nov. 8, 2024 performance at Secret Comedy Club during the Barcelona Fringe Festival.
