"Critic's Pick! Fast and furious...fresh and funny...a great piece of political satire." Cincinnati City Beat "You knew they'd get this one right. THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF COMEDY (abridged) -is a madcap, breakneck-speed two hours. Audacious, often outrageous and bawdy, the frantic pacing of COMEDY reminds you of an old-time burlesque or vaudeville revue." Boston Stages "A wild, wild ride! It's funny. Really, really funny... And most of all, it's really, really smart." Cincinnati Enquirer "THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF COMEDY (abridged) is a master class in the art form." Broadway World
This play interprets the past as a breathlessly-paced sequence of silly vaudeville sketches ... puns and crude parodies of movie and television genres."
Originally performed by its creators, this 1987 Edinburgh Fringe hit remains the second longest-running West End comedy in history and has been translated into over thirty languages. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) is not so much a play as it is a vaudeville show in which three charismatic, wildly ambitious actors attempt to present all thirty-seven of Shakespeare's plays in a single performance. They have a rudimentary concept of the stories and have imperfectly memorized a smattering of famous lines. Backstage there's a meager assortment of costumes and props. Thus armed, the three brazenly launch into their task with an earnest focus and breakneck enthusiasm.
"Critic's Choice! They tell me vaudeville died some time ago, but...the knockabout, anything for-a-laugh spirit of the ancient genre is alive and well. Agile and quick witted...there's no denying their ingenuity when it comes to grabbing comedy out of thin air." Boston Globe "Gloriously irreverent style...a Christmas pageant gone horribly, hilariously awry." Dallas Morning News "These brilliant clowns take us on an irreverent but heartwarming trip through the holidays guaranteed to step on more than a few sacred cows and mistel-toes'." San Diego Magazine
Discovered in a treasure-filled parking lot in Leicester, England (next to a pile of bones that didn't look that important), an ancient manuscript proves to be the long-lost first play written by none other than seventeen-year-old William Shakespeare from Stratford. We are totally not completely making this up. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S LONG LOST FIRST PLAY (abridged) is the literary holy grail: an actual manuscript in Shakespeare's own hand showing all his most famous characters and familiar speeches in a brand-new story. But because it's one hundred hours long and contains multiple unwieldy storylines, it was decided, as a public service, to abridge it down to a brief and palatable ninety-minute performance for this lost masterpiece. "Something wickedly funny this way comes!" The New York Times "A breathlessly irreverent, pun-filled romp!" The Washington Post "A top-notch comic deconstruction of Shakespeare!" The Stage--U K
With a broad scope across the millennia, from high literature to popular culture, between page and stage and screen, this Very Short Introduction considers comedy not only as a literary genre, but also as a broader impulse at work in many other historical and contemporary forms of satire, parody, and play.
“Incredibly entertaining and so damn illuminating” (Entertainment Weekly), Dennard Dayle’s electrifying and wholly original collection of satirical stories create a bitingly funny portrait of American racism, capitalism, and politics. A New Yorker Best Book of the Year “Slyly defiant and blazingly imaginative . . . Dayle’s a genre-shattering writer, whose wit and intellect never cease to entertain.” —New York Times bestselling author Paul Beatty Framed as a reference work of humorous “entries” that offer trenchant social commentary, Everything Abridged presages a dark vision of the near future but tells jokes in the face of it: An intelligence agency operative uncovers a conspiracy to generate conspiracies and realizes his participation in the scheme. A Caribbean monarch meets four decades of American presidents and adjusts his country’s foreign policy accordingly. Experiment participants are asked to bring back a gun as quickly as possible. A copywriter on a space colony advertises a weapon with the potential to destroy his home during an intergalactic war. These and other linked stories, many of which feature a speculative bent—about being Black in America, law enforcement practices in an android society, Olympic speed walking, consumerism, nuclear war, and more—are interspersed with hilarious, one-line definitions for words ranging from abolition to zygote, creating a sharply humorous portrait of American inequality. With his singular wit, sharp prose, and shrewd observations, Dennard Dayle captures the struggles his characters face to keep hold of their sanity in a society collapsing into chaos and absurdity.
