Craig Ricci Shaynak: I Am Google

Just imagining Google as a living, breathing being is a great joke with endless possibilities, and so, there are very few things American character actor Craig Ricci Shaynak could do wrong.

Before his show even starts, Shaynak walks around, warmly introducing himself as Google and forcing waiting audience members to accept cookies, because, if they don’t, their browser won’t work… obviously. Sitting behind a desk littered with dictionaries, telephones, cassettes and more, Shaynak answers different, ridiculous search queries, acts out adverts and talks to his various friends and enemies including his ex-girlfriend Twitter, Facebook, IMDB, Yahoo, Wikipedia and the very lonely and forgotten Tom from MySpace, everyone’s first virtual buddy.

Shaynak is clever and hilarious, improvising bits and asking people for language suggestions, so he can Google Translate (he pulled off a mix of Latin and Swedish). The only weak point for me is the awkward, underlying message that we rely too much on technology: it buzzkilled my LOLs. But still, this is the kind of show that will probably only get stronger and funnier throughout the month, because there’s so much he can do with it. After all, who doesn’t like a good internet joke?