Americans tend to suffer from irony-poor blood. Last week an international passel of authors decreed “Don Quixote” — a supreme high-ironic achievement — the best fiction of all time. Letterman and “Seinfeld” and The Onion notwithstanding, you wonder: If the selection panel had been 100 percent U.S. of A., would “Quixote” have landed anywhere near the top?
Since Sept. 11, pundits all across the political spectrum have declared 9/11 as a death knell for irony. And yet, here’s fecund Second City, soldiering on, trumpeting its latest as “the return of irony in America.”
“Thank Heaven It Wasn’t 7/11,” now on the mainstage, isn’t really making that claim with a straight face. But it’s a tightly staged if surprisingly tame romp through the post-9/11 American psyche in all its chipper no-nothingness, from the White House on down.
One ditty sung by director Joshua Funk’s six-person cast poses the question: “Can we ever go back to not giving a . . . about the rest of the world and who’s living in it?”
No, but when you’re living and dying for basic American necessities such as the Super Big Gulp, along with big gulps of cheap oil, you can dream of yesteryear.
The show gets off to a fine start with a sketch in which Marines overseas tussle with ethnically correct phraseology. One grunt has a problem with the term African-American. “You’re not from Africa; you’re from Gary,” the Marine says to David Pompeii, master of the slow burn.” Therefore, goes the logic, what’s wrong with “Gary-American”?
This segues into a nicely sustained bit in which President Bush receives a briefing from Ari Fleischer, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld about “who’s evil and who’s not.”
Making fun of our current leader’s global awareness level isn’t exactly fresh, but director Funk — who staged the current second-stage show, “Holy War, Batman!” — puts a premium on speed.
The standout segments keep the level of comic observance human-scaled. In one, Brian Boland and Debra Downing play a married couple, the husband zoned out in front of the tube, watching a rain delay, the wife uneasily flipping through a fashion magazine. She wonders if he finds too-thin women with not-small breasts attractive. Boland pauses — an extremely well-judged pause — knowing the answer will not be taken lightly.
Boland is the evening’s ringer, amiably relaxed, amusing just standing there delivering a sincere line in a sincere deadpan. Playing a superhero firefighter, as well as a raging teenage nihilist, Boland is like Norm MacDonald. But funny.
In Act 2 “7/11” relies more and more on shrieking overstatement (as in Martin Garcia’s Baptist minister) and less on incisiveness. An exception is a sweetly observed father/daughter bit, in which Abby Sher’s father, Al Samuels, decides to leave Illinois in order to fight with the Israeli army. Why leave, the daughter argues. “We have Skokie.”
The reply: “Yes, darling, but Skokie isn’t under attack from Northbrook and Wilmette.”
“Thank Heaven It Wasn’t 7/11”
When: Open-ended run
Where: Second City Mainstage, 1616 N. Wells
Phone: 312-337-3992
