Christopher Titus did something Sunday night at the Orlando Improv that I have never seen a comedian pull off, Chris Rock failed to do it at the Theater At Madison Square Garden and Eddie Izzard did not manage the trick at Radio City Music Hall. What Christopher Titus managed was to perform 90 minutes of relentlessly funny material, at least twice Titus had the audience double upped in laughter. Jokes so deeply ingrained in the material they can’t be pled out and retold within morality plays ingrained into a political and social agenda that honored his obsession over his family interest while following a life time trajectory on what he called “Angry Pursuit Of Happiness” Plus, as my niece Kristin Diab noted, “he took on the NRA and discussed Obama in a positive light… in Orlando”.
You may remember Christopher Titus from his short lived FOX show “Titus”, the story of his family history including a mother who shot her abusive second husband dead and later committed suicide, and his womanizing six times married father, who died from a heart attack at the age of 58 and who Titus, self-evidently, worshipped. Or you may remember Titus from his controversial Sarah Palin joke:”I am going to literally, if she gets elected president, I am going to hang out on the grassy knoll all the time, just loaded and ready.”
At 49 years of age the Californian comedian is touring behind his sixth special. Titus, a handsome, extremely smart somewhat manic presence, and his beautiful Southerner wife Rachel “Bombshell” Bradley own their stage for a 135 minutes. Bradley’s own opening half hour was of a piece with Titus’s, filled with her dysfunctional Southern family, stripper jokes that are really funny and one of the best lines of the night (her mother doesn’t text her, her mother subtexts her), the truly bombshell woman in skin tight jeans and perfect hair overcame her good looks.
Titus is the Spalding Gray of stand up. Indeed, he is less a stand up comic and more a comic raconteur performing superbly sculpted performance art with built in punchlines. The time round, when you can get through the usual fun with dysfunctional, Titus explains the nature of an Americans lifespan with stopovers that include a brutal evisceration of the NRA post-Newtown massacre. Titus mocks the NRA’s concern that the Government will take away their guns by mentioning that the Government can’t get a website to work, how are they gonna round up 400 Million guns?
The show built up steadily to his father funeral, including one of the funniest impressions of a man in an open coffin you’ll ever see, and finally, perhaps apt for a man about to hit 50, imagines performing his own “eulogy”, his “melogy”.
Titus handles the stage with ease, confiscating a cell phone from one audience member and talking through rather than to the audience, only once losing his place, his rat- a – tat -tat at the speed of thought and not memory, a triumph of memory and pacing.
With an eye for the fakes and the faux, a distaste for fairy tales, an aim as eager to put down terrorists (“why don’t they blow up their own countries and then come here?”) as the GOP, Titus is a master of construction, the delayed payback, and while getting the audience to chant along to “Arm the children” implicating all over us for being cattle, they don’t make them like him. It amounts to a worldview and an artistry, an autobiography and a shaggy dog story. Titus goes round the world of the mind and his own subconscious, images of drugs guns loss and redemption and while the highlights of his 49 years are repetitions of abandonment and also security, the family as bane of his existence but at the same time an anchor, if Titus can’t get over these childhood traumas, they are so universal they don’t harm his act.
I mentioned Spalding Gray, whose mother also committed suicide, earlier and this superb performance had the feel of a “Monster In A Box” played out in a comedy mode, Titus aim is deadly, his precision a laser and he is just about always on the money.
Grade: A
