Comedy tonight!
I saw the RSC this week. The Royal Shakespeare Company? No, the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Let me put it this way: if the Royal is the caviare of the theater world, the Reduced is its chopped liver–but it’s the funniest chopped liver you’ll ever nosh.
The play in question, if I may be allowed to honor this grab-bag, knockabout farce with the title “play,” is The History of Comedy (Abridged), now at Marin Theatre. Abridged to what? An hour and a half, in which pretty much anything that might be funny, and often is, goes.
It’s the brainchild of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which got its name from its first show, a ninety-minute shrink-wrapping of the Bard’s thirty-six plays into the funny bits (remember how we yocked when Lord and Lady Macbeth did in King Duncan?). Instigated by Daniel Singer in 1981 at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Novato, it emerged fully fledged at 1987’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The rest is history–comedy history, that is. The troupe has added The History of America (Abridged), The Great Books (Abridged) and more to its repertory, and its take, and double take, on who and what makes us laugh follows the same rule as the others: irreverence first.
You will not be surprised, then, to hear that there are farts, both references to them and explosive imitations. “Farts are funny,” we’re told, “and they smell, so that deaf people can enjoy the joke.” The ‘F” word crops up, along with how to make yourself smile if you’re feeling blue: phone your local bowling alley and ask them if they have 12-pound balls. The most irreverent moment may be this joke: Jesus checks into a hotel. He tosses three huge nails onto the front desk. “Can you put me up for the night?” he asks.
The troupe has passed from its original creators into the capable hands of Reed Martin and Piedmont’s own Austin Tichenor; the pair has written all its material since the early 1990s. Their latest foray is structured around a supposed book, The Art of Comedy, by Sun Tzu who penned The Art of War. Each of its thirteen chapters addresses an aspect of comedy, but chapter thirteen is missing. Will it show up before the production is forced off the stage?
The slam-bang evening (there’s lots of physical comedy) ranges from chicken jokes to knock-knocks to puns, and references to dozens of notables, from Abe Lincoln, “the first stand up comic,” to Jack Benny, from Moliere to Neil Simon, from Plautus, the Ancient Roman comedy writer, to Sigmund Freud, the ancient Viennese comedy writer. Even Bill Cosby gets a passing mention, though maybe not for long.
Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor are joined by Dominic Conti for this three-man production. As good as the versatile, round-faced Martin and the limber Conti are, Tichenor is the star. The first to address us, he holds the show together with his cheery frankness and great comic timing, and he owns the evening’s two best moments: a bit as a flim-flam man promoting an Elixir of Laughs, in which he’s as good as Robert Preston in The Music Man, and a quiet ukulele number in which he sings in his light, appealing tenor about all the people, past and present, who make him laugh.
Not everything in The History of Comedy (Abridged) is a knee-slapper, but its performers know it, and they’re expert at turning the groaners into laughs. The show plays in Mill Valley until December 21st, followed in the new year by Daniel Gurira’s The Convert. For tickets/information call 415-388-5208 or visit www.marintheatre.org
–ROBERT HALL