Comedy Review: Doug Benson, Hypocritical Oaf

CD REVIEW
Doug Benson: Hypocritical Oaf
Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

By Ryan P. Carey

In terms of popular touring headliners, Doug Benson is probably the silliest comic on the national radar. This is quite a feat considering that he’s moderately less silly than he was a decade ago. Switching from glasses to contacts is probably not the culprit, and I certainly doubt that focusing in on the cannabis sub-culture has shifted his performance style away from clown-core to punch line tightness. Obviously he’s still somewhere in the middle, but the balance quite suits him, and improvement is usually due to the natural progression of, well, progress.

Benson’s new album Hypocritical Oaf is worth a solid three stars; the material is right on par for Benson. Fortunately, Benson doesn’t pander to his base with a 45-minute bong fest, and even gives a shout-out to the non-smokers in the audience. This reminds us that even though Benson is riding a cozy wave of niche-a-licious THC, his real bread and butter is quite simply — jokes. It shows a certain amount of inner brilliance for Benson to keep on the more difficult task of multifaceted topical humor rather than choosing the easy route of running the herb train into the ground. Then again, it’s probably difficult in its own right to stay fresh on one (quite popular) topic after an off-broadway style play and a documentary film. But I digress.

I have to mention real quick a track about McDonalds in which something anthropologically interesting occurs. (If you’re a fan, stop reading now and finish this after you’ve enjoyed the album because I’m about to spoil a punch line.) Benson talks about performing for a crowd with a group of mentally handicapped audience members. In his anecdote, he explains that while their laughter was sporadic and somewhat un-unified, at a point which Benson says, “Ba-ba-ba-ba-bah…” (i.e. the McDonalds’ jingle), he said that the entire group of mentally challenged patrons yelled “I’m Loving It!” He did an impression that coming from most other comics would be unflattering and probably worth a few groans or “yikes”-styled chuckles. But this story/impersonation got a huge pop of genuine laughter from the entire crowd.

Why didn’t he take some hits for this from a presumably very liberal audience? Is Benson so good-natured and affable that even when engaging a taboo such as blatantly mocking the mentally handicapped, he gets a pass entirely? Is Benson so silly-mannered that he comes off harmlessly as an older brother to the mentally disabled (i.e. “You can’t call my brother stupid, but I can?) I think the unraveling of this joke shows two separate paradigm shifts: First, that cynical pessimism may not be the route automatically set up for success in stand-up comedy anymore (Would Leary’s No Cure for Cancer be the landmark that it is if the same material were recorded today instead of in ’92?) Second, (and probably more relevant culturally) is blatant offensiveness racism, overt misogyny, mean-spiritedness towards the mentally challenged, etc — getting to be such an arcane concept in liberal circles that they are just written off altogether? Stay with me…Even when a super right-winged political figure says something that shows ugly inner thoughts, they are immediately swept off to that podium (Burr, 2003), and they can never look back.

Therefore, when a likable, smiling comedian broaches something potentially insensitive, does the audience seem to feel that he can’t really have anything but love underneath? Otherwise, in today’s climate, he just flat out wouldn’t have said it? Is Doug Benson’s fan base the termination point of liberal-fascism in pop-culture language? Does Marijuana culture lead the way to a more loving state of laid-back social meta-cognition? Does Ryan Stout simply need to smoke up his audiences before the show in order to weed out the groaners? Are big cities in the Midwest like Minneapolis (where Hypocritical Oaf was recorded) leading the way for reasonable contextualization of dialogue? Discuss. Oh, and pick up Benson’s very funny CD.

Ryan P. Carey, D.D.S. is a Philadelphia-based comic and senior contributing writer for STAGE TIME.  Check out his blog at http://dolphindentist.blogspot.com.