By the time you read this, it will be too late to see “Late Nite Comic,” the second musical of the season to open and close on Broadway. A romantic comedy with music and lyrics by Brian Gari and a book by Allan Knee, “Late Nite Comic” preached the moral that if you have low enough standards you can find true love. The plot revolved around a manifestly untalented young man (Robert LuPone) who aspires to be a standup comedian and the whining, vulgar, and materialistic would-be ballerina (Teresa Tracy) he flirts with one night in the hope of securing an introduction to Rodney Dangerfield. The tunes were generic but substandard, and the book (“I know I’m a child, David, but ‘The Nutcracker’—I mean ‘Swan Lake’—that stuff’s so real to me!”) consisted mostly of dialogue between Miss Tracy and Mr. LuPone (“I like touching you.” “Touching’s nice. You know what’s really incredible, though? Bodies!”) except when the hero spoke directly to the audience (“I felt like making love to her—right here! Right now!”). The tone of the evening was set by the lyrics, which gave me the worst case of church giggles I’ve had in ages.
’Cause I learned about danc-ing
And I learned about tour jetés
And I know that it changed my life in many ways—
You couldn’t miss the double-entendre when a big production number about “Having Someone” followed the scene where the hero first scores with the heroine. Even the costumes (by Gail Cooper-Hecht) seemed to grope ineptly after some notion of eroticism, though whether in jest or in earnest is impossible to say. The choreography (by Dennis Dennehy) moved between the mortifyingly vulgar and the mortifyingly routine, reaching its nadir in Act II, when a not very Degas-like tableau come to life and a chorus of showgirls apparently dressed for “Swan Lake” proceeded to dance another ballet entirely (“Carmen,” I think.) As for the director, whose name had been whited out of the Playbill, according to an insert he had “voluntarily” withdrawn from the show some days before.
With the American musical dying all around us and the season just beginning, I can’t help resenting all the real-life stand-up comedians who are appearing on Broadway just now—the one-man shows like Jackie Mason’s “The World According to Me!” at the Brooks Atkinson and “Mort Sahl on Broadway!” at the Neil Simon. It’s a phenomenon that requires some sort of justification, I feel. “Who are these guys,” I ask myself—speaking for the theater community at large—“these campus and Borscht Belt comedians—to be able to fill our theaters and keep them lit when we can’t?” What’s a stand-up comedian doing in a Broadway Theater anyway?
Having seen “The World According to Me!” I find myself wondering if there might not be something innately “theatrical” about the show at the Atkinson after all—if only because it requires Mason to be playacting all evening. Throughout his routine Mason is forever speaking in the voice of someone else—and never more so than when he is ostensibly speaking in his own voice: when he rails against this or that politician or ethnic group, denying fervently that he would ever say such a thing as whatever it is he has just said. We’re left wondering, “Does he mean it?” And because we don’t know whether Mason means it, the humor is double-edged: it attacks both the butt of his jokes and himself, or whoever resembles the person he’s pretending to be.
Mort Sahl’s routine is even more complex: a put-on within a put-on. It starts slowly with predictable barbs aimed at predictable targets—Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Geraldine Ferraro—but as the machinery of Sahl’s routine gets rolling with this or that convoluted story about his “friends” in the Hollywood liberal establishment or his “friends” in the White House, it becomes less and less clear exactly who is putting on whom and where the moral thrust of Sahl’s satire lies. It flits about—like Socrates’ gadfly—settling now here, now there, but never long enough for one to be able to swat it or slap it down. The joke within an anecdote that may or may not be true: it’s a kind of one-man Aristophanic comedy that leaves you laughing—uplifted—because it’s so refreshing, yet not knowing where to turn for comfort or help.
And it is theatrical. The fact is that you don’t actually have to be in a theater to get the full effect of Jackie Mason’s wit and wisdom. I’m glad he has a Broadway show; but nothing happening in the audience or onstage at the Brooks Atkinson really requires you to be in a theater in order to experience it. You can gain just as much from sitting at home and listening to the recording of “The World According to Me!” The show at the Neil Simon Theater demands that one be part of a live audience: you have to watch yourself and those around you being weaned gradually—now by seduction, now by reproach—from the expectable to the unexpected joke, and from the unexpected joke to the unexpected position. And Sahl is seductive—a bit slicker, perhaps, than the underground comic whom members of the Stevenson generation will remember: his demeanor is full of little exclamation points (like the exclamation point in the title of his show)—show-biz walks and gestures and interjections, eye-popping faces and grimaces. But his getup is still the same—the sweater and slacks and open-collar shirt—and he still carries a newspaper; it isn’t rolled, but dailies are thicker now than they were in 1958, and the guy who could roll up a copy of today’s four-section Times probably isn’t a guy you’d want to sit and listen to for an hour and forty minutes. Most of all, what has stayed the same about Mort Sahl is the particular brand of byzantine, time-release wit he traffics in, which is always sharp but never hostile or mean-spirited.
Because Sahl is seen primarily as a political satirist, and because he once publicly supported Stevenson and now publicly supports Al Haig, a good deal of the hype surrounding his show has focused on his own politics and the question of whether or not they have changed. I don’t much care about Sahl’s politics: I suspect that his position is essentially contrarian, hostile to orthodoxy or attitudinizing of any kind—from Republicans, Democrats, liberals, or conservatives. Sahl reminds me of an exchange I once heard in the lobby of a small midtown theater where Penn & Teller were playing.
“They’re great, aren’t they?” a young man said to his date.
“I don’t know, I think they’re sort of Yuppie,” she answered, sounding bored.
“Ye-ah,” the young man agreed doubtfully. “The thing is, it’s sort of Yuppie not to like them.”
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, October 26, 1987