GOING FOR THE JUGGLERS : Flying Karamazovs Throw Together an Act That’s High on the Unconventional

The Flying Karamazov Brothers have never claimed to increase the intelligence quotient of their audiences.

But they very well might, now that UC Irvine neurobiology researchers have found that listening to a two-piano Mozart sonata for 10 minutes can raise the IQ of college students, if only temporarily.

During the anarchistic juggling quartet’s show Saturday night at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, the Flying Karamazovs will perform a two-part piano invention by Bach on the marimba.

“It’s difficult enough to do on the piano,” said Paul David Magid, the troupe’s co-founder, in a recent interview from St. Louis. “We do it note for note while juggling our mallets. And my partner does it from the wrong side of the marimba, which means he’s actually playing it upside down.”

Until scientifically measured, however, any rise in audience IQ that may result from witnessing this musical feat will have to be regarded as coincidental.

Further, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that hearing Bach on the marimba may lower intelligence.

Nor is it entirely clear what the impact will be of the Flying Karamazovs’ excerpts from “Le Petomane: A Comedy of Airs,” also to be included in the show.

Last year in San Diego, by Magid’s account, their full-length production of “Le Petomane”--about a notorious French performer whose cabaret act consisted of breaking wind musically--sent some patrons reeling from the theater.

“I thought that show was a success,” he noted. “But some people were a little aghast, as it were, over what Le Petomane did. He raised (passing gas) to the level of an art, which is what interested us.

“The audience in San Diego is, shall we say, a little conservative. We have to be nice about it. As you get closer to Los Angeles proper, though, we’ve found that audiences get less conservative.”

Not that the Seattle-based Flying Karamazovs (pronounced Kara-MOTT-soffs) are about to test Orange County sensibilities with the full blast of Le Petomane’s musical antics.

Magid said the tonally correct wind songs of the troupe’s other co-founder, Howard Jay Patterson--who takes the part of Le Petomane--will not be on display in Irvine.

Instead, that part of the evening will focus on terpsichorean excerpts from “Le Petomane”--a hip-hop ballet performed in tutus and pink tights to the music of Rossini as well as a Japanese war-cum-fan dance done to the percussive sound of taiko drums.

“We basically do two kinds of productions,” Magid explained. “Our version of various plays, like ‘The Comedy of Errors’ or ‘Le Petomane.’ And our regular kind, which you’re going to see in Irvine--if you can call it regular. It involves the four of us in a free-form format.”

Thus, the main thrust of Saturday’s show (billed as “Juggle and Hyde” and dating from 1986) will consist of highly theatrical juggling routines that are both planned and improvised.

“We hate to be preachy, but if you can see beyond the show’s level of silliness and hilarity,” said Magid, 39, a.k.a. Dmitri Karamazov, “you will see it’s about the void and containment, self and not-self, life and death, good and evil, gravity pulling you down, aging.”

It should be apparent by now that the Flying Karamazovs do not consider themselves mere jugglers.

“If we were,” Magid said, “you wouldn’t be talking to me because nobody would be interested. We probably wouldn’t even exist as a group because none of us is that great at juggling.”

Unlike a circus act, the Flying Karamazovs go out of their way to engage their audiences with persiflage. One ritual of their shows, for example, is to explain assorted tricks while they’re being performed.

“We know that nobody really understands juggling,” Magid said. “So we tell them exactly what’s happening in an entertaining way. Once people understand what it is you’re doing, then they can see the magic in it.”

Given to bad puns, vaudeville mayhem and comic pontification--their term is “cheap theatrics”--the Flying Karamazovs first took flight in Northern California, where Magid and Patterson (Ivan Karamazov) met during the early ‘70s as undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz. They both discovered juggling there.

“We were just a couple of guys who lived across the hall from each other in the dormitory,” Magid recalled. “I needed an opening act for a commedia dell’arte play I was in, ‘The Three Cuckolds.’ So the two of us did some juggling and got a better reception than the play. We thought, ‘Hey!’ It wasn’t that hard to figure out we had something.”

Still, the pair never considered turning professional until “somebody dropped $1.65 into a hat we put down” at a street fair in Los Angeles.

“That was the first time we ever earned money,” Magid said, even recalling the precise date (April 23, 1973). “We thought, ‘My God! People will pay for this!’ ”

As for their stage name, they simply took it from the 19th-Century Russian novel that Patterson happened to be reading at the time--”The Brothers Karamazov” by Fyodor Dostoevsky--and added a fanciful twist to suggest something airy or at least less brooding.

Since then, they’ve enlisted other brothers, starred on Broadway and television, won many awards (including an Emmy) and appeared in movies. Their current fraternity includes Sam Williams (Smerdyakov), who joined them in 1980, and Michael Preston (Ratikin), who joined in 1992.

And true to their name, they’ve put in more flying than they care to think about, logging as many as 250,000 miles a year for worldwide engagements that keep them traveling nine months a year.

During the past 10 days alone their itinerary took them from Dallas to Seattle to St. Louis to Juneau, Alaska, and back to Seattle, while Magid went to New York by himself to rehearse a play he has written and soon will star in, separately from the Flying Ks, in Berlin.

“When people write about us they always rediscover that we’re not really brothers and we don’t really fly, except in airplanes,” Magid said. “But one time somebody wrote something like, ‘They’re not holy. They’re not Roman. And they’re certainly not the empire.’ Gee, we’re not the Holy Roman Empire? Imagine that.”

Moving right along from non sequiturs to the sort of quips and bad puns he favors, Magid also revealed that over the years he has read virtually all of Dostoevsky’s literary output.

“I didn’t read it in the Russian, unfortunately. I wish I could. But I was in a hurry.”

Not surprisingly, the Flying Karamazovs pay more homage to the Marx Brothers in their shows than they do to Dostoevsky, even though their signature piece is called, “The Gamble,” a reference to one of the Russian author’s especially autobiographical works, a masterful short novel titled “The Gambler.”

In “The Gamble,” which will be performed at the Irvine Barclay, Patterson offers to juggle any three objects volunteered by the crowd. If he succeeds in keeping them aloft to the count of 10, the audience must give him a standing ovation. If he fails, he gets a pie in the face.

The only stipulations are these: He gets three tries; the objects must weigh more than an ounce and less than a pound and be no bigger than a bread box; they cannot be alive, and they cannot kill him.

Audiences who have seen the Flying Karamazovs before tend to come well-prepared for this perennial routine.

“We’ve been doing ‘The Gamble’ for about 15 years,” Magid said. “So people bring some pretty weird objects. Pizzas, dead fish, breast implants, Slinkies--Howard has done them all. Have you ever looked in a woman’s handbag? He once did a dead octopus.”

Despite the rules, meat cleavers are allowed. In fact, the Flying Ks bring their own cleavers for another of their many routines.

“We want to avoid certain death,” Magid explained, “not probable death.”