I never went to Helium until last night. After I grabbed a seat in the showroom and ordered a beer, I realized they were playing the Counting Crowes’ “Mr. Jones.” I thought of this guy in New York I knew, who lived five floors down from Adam Duritz. Apparently, Duritz totally stole said guy’s date after she had already come back to his place. In 2004. Hilarious! And ultimately very, very sad.

Anyway, I was there to check out The Sixth Borough in advance of their fundraiser this Friday night at Connie’s Ric Rac. They successfully distracted me from my contemplation of the ripple effects of middlebrow singers with comedy sketches. Some topics include: laser dicks, astronaut penises, destructive sex rays emanating from filthy hipsters, a Canadian monkey reading Ishmael (“It’s not a Jewish book, eh! It’s about the arrogance and stupidity of humanity, eh!”), how a Scientologist uses cocaine (hint: in the opposite direction of the excretory process), and waiting for your last kid to die on your way out West in the frontier days so you can be free.

All this and more won The Sixth Borough the Audience and Judge’s Awards at Chicago’s Snubfest last month, which, in turn, got them invitations to the 2009 Milwaukee Comedy Festival and 2010 Montreal Sketch Comedy Festival. After the show, Tabitha Vidaurri and Corey Cohen from The Sixth Borough told me this was their road set, so very soon, the Sixth Borough camper (that’s the travel plan) will roll up to Milwaukee to deliver their satirical takes on arrogance, cults, and sex to beefy Midwesterners.

Their past two Philly Fringe productions looked at adulthood in 2007 and world crisis in 2008. This fall, in their third Fringe show, they’ll take on time. In Timejawn, Tabitha said, “We’ll cover ancient Rome to a Bladerunner-type future. It’s tied together at the beginning and the end by a four-person time-travel squad.”

Despite taking on some larger themes, Corey said that they still stay grounded in South Philly, where all members of the group currently live. “I don’t want to give too much away, but there’s an Italian cyborg. It’s like a Terminator-style movie preview: he travels through time to keep a guy from fucking his sister.”

Tabitha said that in the past few years, Philadelphia comics have been able to establish themselves a little more. And like members of the theater and dance communities, there’s a lot of cross-pollination, with people appearing in each other’s shows and working together to help each other out.

Indeed, a few comedians – Joey Dougherty, Doogie Horner, and Dave Walk – are lending their support to The Sixth Borough on Friday, when they’re raising money to rent that Winnebago for the Milwaukee trip. $10 at Connie’s Ric Rac, BYOB, auctions – details in the flyer above.

–Nicholas Gilewicz