GOP Guffaws: Comics Hope to Lure RNC Visitors to Clubs

New York, NY —

Several Broadway shows are selling deeply discounted tickets next week, and others have closed altogether. The Republicans don’t seem to be heading toward the theater. WNYC’s Fred Mogul talks with a different group of stage performers who hope to make the most of the Republican National Convention.

REPORTER: Artists, and certainly satirists, tend to think of themselves as anti-establishment.

BRYAN DYKSTRA: Just Say No, America. It’s easy. Just Say No. America the beautiful, rather than beautifully lying, backward dying, black and blue, in pools of oily stupor, a hypo-dermic, barrel-fed, mainline super-duper stupor...

REPORTER: That’s Bryan Dykstra, in “Cornered and Alone,” at the Triad Theater – one of several subversive shows around town promoting themselves as a sort of cultural ‘kryptonite’ for Republicans. So who will entertain and amuse the GOP delegates and lobbyists? Meet Julia Gorin, from “Right Stuff Comedy” troupe, performing at The Laugh Factory through Thursday.

Early on in the Iraq war there was, um, all this uproar, this international outrage -- and by our Democrats here, especially -- over the missing tshotchkes from the museum, from the Baghdad Museum, you know? Everyone got so upset, you know, it was sorta like, “Well, okay, liberation from decades of human suffering and torture and oppression, but you didn’t say it was gonna come at the expense of the tsotchkes!”

“Right Stuff Comedy” bills itself as clean entertainment for “real people.” For Sheryl Underwood, “keeping it real” means lambasting liberals in racy, racial ways.

UNDERWOOD: Black people always say Republicans don’t help the poor. Why do we always wanna be poor? Why don’t you buy some stock. Black people say stock is too risky. Then they go buy lottery tickets every Friday…

REPORTER: Underwood thinks President Bush is sexy, especially when he puts on his little ‘Top Gun’ suit and lands fighter planes on airplane carriers. But Underwood admits her way of praising the president’s manliness might not be for everyone.

UNDERWOOD: like George Bush. I call him “Killer.” I feel it’s good to have someone who will bomb another country in the White House, especially after September 11th.

REPORTER: Underwood will be performing at Caroline’s next week. Laurie Kilmartin will be at The Improv. She won’t be reaching out to Republicans so much as stifling her anti-Bush tendencies, but she’s okay with that. She doesn’t do straight political humor anyway. She sneaks up on her audience, hoping to make them laugh before they have time to be offended..

KILMARTIN: I feel fat. It’s been eight months since the baby, and I haven’t dropped a pound of my abortion weight…' and then I go on to the next joke that would also be in that vein: 'I’m kidding, I dropped a pound that day.

MOGUL: Kilmartin doesn’t have any anti-Kerry material. Nothing’s occurred to her, other than the obvious stuff everyone else says about how stiff he is. She thinks even if she had some inspired jibes, she’d probably suppress them rather than give aid and comfort to the enemy. Not so Walter Frazier, a paunchy, bearded and be-spectacled Michael Moore impersonator.

FRAZIER: Mr. Bush, Mr. Bush, we don’t support that war of yours.

REPORTER: Frazier has rented himself out to some anti-Bush events, but wants to hire himself out to Republicans, too. He doesn’t tell this to everyone, but he IS one of them.