I like Colin
Quinn, I genuinely do. He’s a gifted performer, a smart, funny comedian, he
holds an audience, he gets big laughs and he can sustain a themed set for 80 or
more intermissionless minutes, which he has done an- and off-Broadway three
times since 2010, including the current show. (I discount the first, An Irish Wake, a bit of co-authored
autobiography that was really a one-man memory play. He owns it, but another
actor credible to the material, could deliver it.) And where comedy is
concerned, given a general audience and a mainstream voice, standup is perhaps
the most democratic form of humor. If they laugh, solidly and consistently,
it’s funny. That’s unequivocal. And the current musing, about that which
distinguishes various red state and blue state personalities, elicits the usual
result.
I
looked up my reviews of his two previous shows.
For the first I
wrote:
As always, Quinn is a great
raconteur-performer, his oft-brilliant material stamped with a singular
imprimatur; and as always, he makes the audience very happy. And as always, for
me, about 45 minutes in, I start to check out, even though I promise myself
it’ll be different this time. I have no explanation for this other than that
Quinn isn’t really pursuing a narrative, he’s exploring a point of view,
umbrella topic and subtopics; and after 45 minutes it’s like too much dessert,
or too rich a dessert, the topic association loses me and I
struggle to keep up till the end. I’ve discussed this with a few other people
and discovered, surprisingly, that I’m not alone.
For the second I
wrote:
It’s a funny idea and
within there are some funny riffs, but as with most stand-up routines, there’s
a certain stream-of-consciousness threading that ties the components together,
and so the focus of the piece isn’t always as sharp as it promises to be, with
the result that one’s own focus can waver. Which is not to say that Quinn is
bombing or loses laughs. Enough of the audience stays with him to give the
impression that, whatever may be true about the over-arching thesis, he’s
still, moment-to-moment, on his game.
Nothing much in Red State, Blue State compels me to
write anything new. The game is the same. With one difference:
This time, I didn’t make it to 45 minutes…
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