If the name of comedy duo Bangin’: Crimes of Passion doesn’t intrigue you enough to give them a shot, perhaps a description of the show that Jessika Stocker and Dan Hanf will bring to Charleston Comedy Festival’s Comedy Marathon will do the trick.

“There are spies,” Stocker says. “Dracula makes an appearance.”

“We’ve got some scathing takes on multilevel marketing and Avon ladies,” Hanf says. “There’s some singing. There are monologues. There’s violence. There’s reconciliation. It’s a very dynamic show.”

“We did Comedy Festival last year, but I think this year our show is more character-based,” Stocker says, “and there’s a lot more slapstick elements and kind of like classical comedy.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of wordplay. There’s a lot of physical comedy. I would say it’s more scripted than last time,” Hanf says. “Our previous show we had like set ideas for our sketches, but we felt pretty free to improvise inside of them. And when we were writing this show, I think we wrote enough like specific wordplay jokes that we really needed to have a more solid understanding of our lines and stuff.”

Stocker and Hanf found comedy through different paths — Stocker was originally a theater kid at Charleston County School of the Arts, and Hanf was in a local comedy band called Introducing Fish Taco — but both later became involved in Theatre 99. The two were roommates, started dating, and moved to New York together.

“And then we just started writing stuff together, because we both really enjoy each other’s sense of humor, and we work really well together,” Stocker says. “I think the chemistry is pretty clear onstage.”

And performing as a duo has been the ideal situation for the pair, both personally and professionally.

“It’s one of these things where it’s like we both like doing comedy. We’re dating. We both think each other are funny. And so it just kind of writes itself,” Hanf says. “We do a show together, and that way one of us doesn’t have to like go on a road show without the other one. We can just kind of pack up our lives and do our show together.” —Emily Pietras

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