Ass You Like It

The group’s commitment partly explains the enduring fascination that vaudeville and its stepchildren hold for boomers and Generations X and Y alike. Back in the late 1980s, Los Angeles enjoyed a somewhat subterranean outpouring of gross-out comedy, meta-Catskills standup and full-on gore with Stephen Holman’s Theatre Carnivale group and Charles Schneider’s Theatre du Grand Guignol. A few years before these outfits, the Actors Gang had begun a long run of commedia dell’arte–fueled productions inspired by vaudeville, carnies, circuses and freak shows, in which political messages were delivered amid pratfalls and loopy sound effects. Today, pastie-titted burlesque thrives in the voluptuous form of the Velvet Hammer, a local company of strippers who seem inspired in equal parts by Blaze Starr, Bettie Page and Russ Meyer; and Weimar cabaret, oh chum, can be found in the ambisexual offerings of the Bricktops club every Friday night at West Hollywood’s Parlour Club.

“Dead as vaudeville,” then, isn’t such a definite epitaph after all. There’s something vital and viral, in its brutal roundelays of digs against respectability and sexual conformity, that nourishes every insurgent generation’s ridicule of both society and its acceptable forms of entertainment. You could, if you were looking, also find in The (Magnificent) Ass Show’s balls-out vulgarity traces of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu plays and Dario Fo, but then, that may be going too far. In the end, as it were, a show in which actors pour brandy over Miss Browntown’s cheeks and light cigarettes dangerously close to her “mouth” is simply joining the Tom Greens and brothers Farrelly in a search for quick, cheap laughs, figuring the grossest is the mostest.

THE (MAGNIFICENT) ASS SHOW | By MAURISSA AFANADOR

At THEATRE/THEATER, 6425 Hollywood Blvd.; (310) 665-2963

Through September 27