nj arts maven: Artist Spotlight: Reduced Shakespeare Company

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Reduced Shakespeare Company
The Complete History of Comedy (Abridged)

SATURDAY, APRIL 8, 2023, at 8:00PM

The McCarter audience favorite returns

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Tickets to The Complete History of Comedy (abridged) are far more affordable than tickets to an amusement park, but you’ll come away with the same feeling of nausea and motion sickness. From cavemen telling "Rock Rock" jokes to Will Smith upset at Chris Rock’s jokes and everything in-between, the bad boys of abridgment leave no joke untold as they deconstruct the entire history of comedy in 90 rollicking minutes.

They’ve skewered history, the Bible and the world’s most celebrated playwright. Now, the Reduced Shakespeare Company tackles the subject it was born to reduce. From the high-brow to the low, The Complete History of Comedy (abridged) covers comedy through the ages, from Aristophanes and Shakespeare and Moliere (Is Moliere funny? Why not?) to Vaudeville and Charlie Chaplin to The Daily Show and Anthony Weiner.

The Complete History of Comedy (abridged) answers the fundamental questions:

- Which is the least funny nationality? Which is the funniest? Why did the former try to exterminate the latter?

- How do critics describe everything in a way to make it sound unfunny? ("First of all, the premise is weak. No one would ever believe that a baseball team would actually have a first baseman named "Who.")

- Why, in fact, did the chicken cross the road?

The Bard is Back!

Special Streaming Event!

Next in the Bard at the Gate series available on Broadway on Demand:

Bard at the Gate directly responds to the lack of representation of diverse voices within the American theatrical canon. This uniquely curated virtual reading series is designed to become a widely accessible platform for powerful, overlooked plays by BIPOC, female, LGBTQIA+, and disabled artists.

CUT: A Blasphemy is a riveting, darkly comic encounter between the legendary Samson and his addiction to the Philistine Delilah, who beguiles him with her wit, her fury as an outsider and her skills at bondage. How deeply embedded is our sense of insider privilege and how does it blind us?