In Tuesday's Washington Post, Peter Marks praises "Get Your War On," a left-wing comedy performance at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre. Unsurprisingly, the critic from the liberal paper finds invective is a lovely thing, if applied to conservatives:
Invective can be a wonderful tool. Especially when it's wielded as brilliantly as the verbal gunslingers brandish it in "Get Your War On," which contains some of the funniest ridicule of a president and his policies I've ever heard on a stage.
The five performers from Rude Mechs, an Austin-based theater gang that has come to Woolly Mammoth's D Street space for an all-too-brief run, have other weapons in their arsenal: contempt. Fearlessness. A hilarious grasp of absurdity. And perhaps most important, a nifty array of targets, from the dubious authenticity of some of the CIA's intelligence-gathering to the intelligence of the president himself.
This humor sounds well-aged -- like a four-year-old carton of milk. Marks allows that the MoveOn.org crowd will find it much funnier than the Heritage Foundation gang, but would the objective or apolitical person find these gags hilarious?
Each is well-schooled in a machine-gun-style delivery that compels an audience to stay on its toes. "Did you listen to the president's State of the Union address last night?" one cast member asks another. "It felt like rubbernecking a highway accident made entirely of words."
Worried about the degree to which the theory of evolution is under attack, another cast member wants to tone down the confrontational rhetoric, so that the red states won't try to further dilute the science curriculum. "We've still got the law of gravity," he says. "Let's not blow it!"
North Korea -- embodied by an actor wearing a foam cutout map of the country -- repeatedly barges in on the proceedings. Mostly, it just wants attention. A dozen degrees more tasteless is a guy dressed as a feeding tube who purports to be a refugee from the Terri Schiavo case. (As I said: Nothing here is sacred.)
I'd say nothing here is funny.
