Hard
Laughter
By David Finkle
Mondo Drama
By Douglas Carter Beane
Drama Dept. (closed)
The Play What I Wrote
By Sean Foley, Hamish McColl, and Eddie Braben
Lyceum Theater (closed)
Dying is easy; comedy is hard
--Sir Donald Wolfit's supposed last words.
Zero Mostel once did a comedy sketch for
a television special where he sat in an auditorium seat surrounded
by a dozen or so well-dressed fellow spectators. As they all faced
the camera, garbled conversation was heard, spoken by offscreen
actors understood to be performing a play. Listening to the unintelligible
banter, the people around Mostel laughed heartily while he shed
tears. When they began abruptly to cry, however, he just as abruptly
started guffawing.
The apparent point of the hunk of material
was that Mostel, himself an obstreperous comic actor, was out
of step in a mainstream crowd. They were either impervious to
his status or unaffected by it. A secondary implication was that
what makes one man laugh will not necessarily be even slightly
risible to the next. In some ways, the Mostel routine recalls
the old slipping-on-a-banana-peel sight gag: some on-lookers might
yuk it up, while others would more routinely empathize with the
pain and humiliation endured by the slipper.
But who can be definitive about the disparity?
When Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature
at Harvard, gave a summer course called "Wit and Humor," he was
asked for his considered opinion and could only respond, "Literary
criticism has always been more comfortable with high-minded theories
of tragedy than with trying to explain comedy. It's tragedy whose
existence is easy to explain and laughter that seems mysterious."
His statement, of course, supplies wiggle
room to anyone assessing comedies, and that extends to Mondo
Drama and The Play What I Wrote, two comic plays
recently causing many Manhattan attendees to slap their thighs
and hold their sides while, elbow to elbow with them, others are
silently thinking, "What's so goddam amusing?" Curiously enough,
both comedies--the former a homegrown off-Broadway enterprise,
the latter an English import on Broadway--have certain similarities:
they feature casts of three and are more accurately described
as comedy revues with a unifying theme.
Mondo Drama is playwright Douglas
Carter Beane jumping on the 1962 documentary Mondo Cane
as a springboard for a series of satirical sketches that comment
about the way we live now. He's making the not-so-subtle claim
that today's mondo isn't much different from the figuratively
and literally dog-eat-dog global environment four decades back.
Possibly convinced that things are much worse now, he has written
his jokey treatise for three women whom he dubs Prima, Secunda
and Terza in keeping with the flick's appropriated Italian title.
The Play What I Wrote has been
structured by Hamish McColl, Sean Foley and Eddie Braben for three
men--McColl, Foley and Toby Jones. (A fourth actor is required,
since a "surprise guest"--not much of a surprise at all when it's
Roger Moore--arrives for a second-act turn.) The source material
is the oeuvre of comics Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, for whom
Braben wrote, primarily in the 1970s when the team became television
icons in Great Britain. The narrative thread--connecting what
seem to be versions of Morecambe and Wise routines with which
British televiewers may be familiar--is that McColl is itching
to leave the double act so he can appear in the play what he wrote,
which is called A Tight Squeeze for the Scarlet Pimple.
The punning title is a fair promise, or warning, of what's to
come in the way of verbal humor.
But if comedy is in the ear and eye of
the beholder, does that mean there are no absolute criteria by
which to judge what's sturdy literary matter and what's not? Can
a critic say anything more than, "Look, this is what goes on here,
and while I don't think it's successful, you might"? Or, conversely,
"I think it's effective, but you might not"? Does it all come
down to the difference between the bumps on one man's funnybone
as opposed to another's?
Perhaps not. Mondo Drama and The
Play What I Wrote offer indices to gauge the authenticity
of true humor. As with any writing that builds on conventions,
certain elements are required. To start, the basic premise needs
to be original or fresh, or at least the treatment of it has to
be. With Mondo Drama, Beane does seem to be on new, or
at least not overdeveloped, ground. The play's very allusion to
the savage world that Mondo Cane purported to reveal
suggests--by way of grainy footage projected on the show curtain
and portentous opening narration--that contemporary social and
political situations are about to be sent up savagely.
But
within minutes a truism of revues kicks in: momentum has to be
gathered with each succeeding sketch, with each skit topping the
one before it, or at least equaling it. The failure to achieve
this goal explains why the adjective "uneven" so often crops up
in revue reviews. So while the premise for Mondo Drama
is solid, the premises for the sketches as they pass are, uh,
uneven: meat-packing-district drag-queen prosties revealed to
be middle-class women; a society lady who adopts a black child
in order to keep up with the Blaine Trumps; debutantes sold into
white slavery; women in an African tribes discussing outlandish
fertility strategies while scoffing at intercourse; Amsterdam
hookers who swap recipes while posing for prospective clients.
In these segments and more, Beane either finds the stale angle
and sticks with it, or--in the instance of the debutante slaves
and the African women--takes an outre approach when something
grounded in an unfortunate contemporary truth would have been
more effective. Granted, AIDS is a challenging topic for jests,
but it's a more immediate concern for women in Africa than the
one Beane sees fit to rib.
Judged on their premises alone, the Beane
sketches that actually have some surprise quotient number only
three. In one, a devout Catholic sees a vision of the Virgin Mary
though there's evidence that priests taking liberties with an
altar boy have something to do with the apparition. In another,
Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa chats post-modernly with a performance
artist whose work involves cosmetic surgery. In the third, members
of The Old White Man's Women's Auxiliary speak out on behalf of
their husbands' bigotry. Each of the segments delivers a frisson
of delight, and had Beane been inspired to work at that level
throughout Mondo Drama, he would have had something.
Which brings up the next requirement for
genuinely funny skits: funny lines. (Duh, as they say.) On this
meter, Beane scores more heavily and is rewarded by making even
some of those most resistant to his work inclined to forgive its
deficiencies. "Hello, I'm Mona Lisa--I'm art," the Gioconda announces
to her conversation partner. A witch at a black mass upbraids
those in attendance by declaring, "There was a time when a witch
was the source of all suffering in the world. Now the other religions
are moving ahead of us in evil deeds." A middle-class woman posing
as a hooker and looking for a straight man asks about a prospect
pointed out to her, "The big number with the gravelly voice and
the swagger and the blue blazer?" She's answered, "No, next to
Fran Lebowitz." Pretty funny, although the last gag is also indicative
of Beane's penchant for famous-name quips. The Lebowitz dig also
hints at the play's many oblique put-downs of women, often a giveaway
of a gay-male sensibility. As is the incessant quoting of lyrics
to show tunes.
Yet another rule of good sketch writing,
which Beane either disregards or can't follow, is finding a rollicking
tagline. Monty Python's John Cleese et al got around this genuine
challenge by cutting away from a sketch before it had time to
end. Beane doesn't avail himself of that sly evasion. No, he goes
for it and, more often than not, misses. The society climber with
the hungry child on her hands says triumphantly, "This will be
the issue of my life, the starving children, my reason for living,
my cause. And Brooke can't have it." (In the script Beane types
the last five words as all caps and adds three exclamation points.)
Miso Shy, who also confides "me so shy," ends a pitch for human
flesh dim sum and the like by recommending number 35 on her establishment's
menu "because you wonton the velly best." Even the deft Mona Lisa
sequence ends with a thudding, "Hey, I'm a masterpiece." More
moan than Mona, you could say.
Revue has traditionally counted on personalities
to help it land solidly--stars for whom the material is tailored
or comic actors equipped to take the lines and run with them.
Beane got lucky with Siobhan Mahoney, Caroline Rhea and Miriam
Shor, as well as with director Christopher Ashley, who knew how
to handle the women if not how to get the author to do his best
work. Changing costumes and wigs with alacrity, the women polish
the silver-plated pieces as if they were sterling and do more
than their share to make Beane sound better than he is. Sitting
on the auditorium seats that are the play's set and facing the
audience for the ol' we're-watching-you-while-you're-watching-us
bit, they even make Beane's soupy concluding sallies about loving
the pervert in everybody work better than they should. The cast
suggests an update of the phrase "the singer not the song." In
their case, it's "the comic not the comic line."
The comedy prescriptions from which McColl,
Foley and Braben avert their attention with The Play What
I Wrote also center around originality or the lack thereof.
(By the way, there is a difference between dismissing rules and
knowing them well enough to be confident while breaking them.
Rule-breaking from the latter vantage point is practically a sine
qua non of adventurous comedy or adventurous art of any kind,
for that matter.) The McColl-Foley-Braben farrago isn't particularly
original in either its concept, execution or playing.
Dusting off old comedy skits, even if they
are associated with the venerated Morecambe and Wise, and then
inking in a guest star isn't a promising formula. To the contrary,
it instantly gives the impression that what's in store is not
so much a play as a television variety hour (and this in an age
when television variety hours are all but defunct). As McColl
and Foley parade silly walks and silly songs and unrestrained
puns and comic names (the event's producer Mike Nichols is lampooned
as Mike Tickles), the pair do nothing to contradict the creaky
variety-hour atmosphere. Not with pokes at fading celebrities
like Robert Goulet. Not with lines like, "Her teeth are like stars,
they come out at night," which most members of any given audience
will recall from their school yards.
Perhaps the writers subscribe to the theory
that relentlessly delivering old-hat japes becomes, by some show-biz
alchemy, new-hat. (With The Producers, Mel Brooks and Tom Meehan
demonstrated it could still click. But McColl, Foley and Braben
don't have that skill.) Or perhaps they subscribe to the theory
that if you string together enough hoary gags the crowd will eventually
succumb to sheer numbers. It doesn't happen in The Play What
I Wrote, despite the occasional admirable old crack. Late
in the show, when the guest star comes upon Foley and Wise in
their sight-gag bed--they're standing--he (or she) asks, "Can
I come in?" To which Foley replies, "You can, but you'll have
to make up your own lines." Maybe you had to be there, but it's
worth a chuckle.
It's
possible that McColl and Foley could have worked performing magic
on the play and the play-within-the play if they had been the
masters of inspired foolery that their advance press touted. Some
years ago they proved themselves capable entertainers when, as
The Right Size, they brought Do You Come Here Often?
(a show set in a public toilet) to Manhattan's P. S. 122. But
can they really be meaningfully compared to Bing Crosby, Bob Hope
and the road pictures, as their director, Kenneth Branagh, suggested
in The New York Times?. Not really, not this time. They're
more reminiscent of the male comedy teams that followed Dean Martin
and Jerry Lewis in the late 40s. They most closely resemble the
team of Pepper Davis and Tony Reese, whom Ed Sullivan often featured
on, yes, his variety hour and whose signature routine was a take-off
of night-club acts. In that routine they were breathless chorus
boys who had to make a talentless headliner look good.
Trevor Griffiths's Comedians,
which is not a comedy although it contains many somber laughs,
was given a superb revival this year--an underrated one because
many critics dismissed it as dated. They failed to notice that
the play is actually about hatred and intolerance, conditions
which unfortunately haven't dated in the history of humankind.
In Griffiths's scorching drama, Eddie Waters, who runs a Manchester
night class for aspiring comics, has this to say about his subject:
"It's not the jokes. It's what lies behind 'em. It's the attitude.
A real comedian--that's a daring man. He dares to see what his
listeners shy away from, fear to express. And what he sees is
a sort of truth, about people, about their situation, about what
hurts or terrifies them, about what's hard, above all, about what
they want. A joke releases the tension, says the unsayable, any
joke pretty well. But a true joke, a comedian's joke, has to do
more than release tension, it has to change the situation."
This trenchant definition of situation
comedy offers yet another yardstick by which to evaluate Mondo
Drama and The Play What I Wrote. They leave their
situations just about where they found them.
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