About seven
seconds after last week's bombing, Colin Quinn was sick of
hearing ''Wag the Dog'' jokes. He's sick of the dress jokes, the
Linda Tripp jokes and the Southern-fried sex jokes that pass for
political commentary these days, and he's particularly sick that
he can't use any of these jokes yet because ''Saturday Night
Live's'' season doesn't start until next month. But there is a
deeper vein of comedy to be found beneath the headlines, he is
convinced, a more sorrowful humor that he has mined for years in
his stand-up act and that thoroughly informs his one-man memory
play that began performances last night on Broadway.
What's truly funny, he says, is what hurts the most, as couples
stare into the vacuum of the Clintons' marriage and find
something familiar staring back. ''You think about the dead air
between Bill and Hillary, when all the cameras are off and the
advisers are gone and you're just sitting there with your wife,''
he said a few days ago, swirling the ice around in a ginger ale.
''And you realize he would do anything not to be there. He's
inviting the Secret Service guys in, just to talk. He's calling
up prime ministers and saying: 'Call me in five minutes on the
red phone. Tell me I've got to drop over to your country right
away.' That's why he's bombing Afghanistan -- not the 'Wag the
Dog' thing, but just to get away from Hillary.'' Husbands and
wives who barely speak to each other are arguing together through
the Clintons, he said, taking one side or the other, using the
scandal as a kind of marital aid to deal with the issues in their
own marriages that they otherwise could not discuss.
''That's what's funny: the uncomfortable thing that you can't
talk about, the tension,'' he said. ''You have to find the truth
and then exaggerate it.''
For Mr. Quinn, 39, whose childhood in Park Slope, Brooklyn, has
made him one of the few authentic New Yorkers in the ''Saturday
Night Live'' cast, the truth is the old neighborhood, and the
comic exaggeration -- Joycean in spirit if not exactly in
ambition -- is his play, ''An Irish Wake.'' Along with his
collaborator, Lou DiMaggio, a fellow comedian, Mr. Quinn has
worked and reworked the script through a variety of names and
productions for the better part of a decade, seeking precisely
the right voice for the characters who populated First Street and
Garfield Place near Prospect Park in the 1970's. This was before
the bookstores and margaritas and European strollers, before
everyone went indoors to talk on the Internet, back when kids of
half a dozen races still played stickball and box ball on the
street between the trash cans. It's about a kid looking around
him and seeing everything dying,'' Mr. DiMaggio said, ''a
neighborhood and a way of life. He's got this bittersweet humor,
kind of splitting the difference between truth and sadness.''
The play is constructed around a series of generally profane
takes on each of the seven sacraments, using characters like
Jimmy, always out with his garden hose on the sidewalk, grousing
about the kids who knocked over his St. Francis bird feeder, and
J. T., the addled dealer who recounts a peculiarly Brooklyn form
of baptism in a graveyard. It's a stoopside humor, ruefully Irish
in tone but not far from the closely observed mania of John
Leguizamo's Colombian-flavored autobiographies of Jackson
Heights.
Mr. Quinn came up with it years ago in exile in Los Angeles,
doing stand-up and some television writing, suddenly overpowered
by memories of a neighborhood interred by real estate prices. He
is frankly sacramental on the subject: ''Transubstantiation is
what it is,'' he said, ''the neighborhood that changed, not quite
true and not quite metaphorical.''
But as possessed as he is by memory, he is actually better known
for humor of the moment, having taken over the Weekend Update
desk on ''Saturday Night Live'' last season after a series of
routines ''explaining'' The New York Times. (Now, he said, the
graphic content of The Times in the last few weeks has left him
with little left to parody, so he'll be doing Update full time.)
Friends who hung out with him on Garfield said he used to do
news-based humor as a teen-ager as well, and Lorne Michaels, the
executive producer of the show, said Mr. Quinn has the
truth-telling quality the segment needs. ''There's a certain kind
of truth that New Yorkers have,'' said Mr. Michaels, who also
helped bring the play to Broadway after seeing the version called
''Sanctifying Grace.'' ''They have less time in their lives, so
they get to it faster. He looks into the lens and talks about the
things he really knows.''
Mr. Quinn, the son of a City College English professor, now has
the high-rise Manhattan apartment (near Columbus Circle) he had
always dreamed of, but still shows up for an interview unshaven
in a hooded sweatshirt, carrying the street on his back, riffing
about how a Baptist President doesn't know how to confess. He is
not terribly sparing of his old friends, appreciating them mainly
for their faults, and his colleagues are hopeful he never
ventures far from the truth. ''It's good to see the comic's comic
finally getting a break,'' said Chris Rock, who knew Mr. Quinn
long before they worked together on ''Saturday Night Live.'' ''It
couldn't happen to a nicer -- actually, I couldn't care less if
he's a nice guy or not. It's not nice humor. What it is, is
funny.''
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