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Okay. You're a respected and revered award-winning cartoonist watching your country being taken over by an administration that needs barely any tweaking to turn them into greedy caricatures. You yearn for political debate and want to understand how Middle America could be falling for the greatest Super Villain team to hit the books since the Legion of Doom. What do you do? Dan Piraro, New York-based creator of the newspaper comic, Bizarro, decided to fight back with the weapon that confuses the Right the most: humor. The result, Bizarro's PolitiComedy-A-Go-Go, is a show that tackles the serious issues our country now faces with gusto, nerve and spunk. But most importantly, Bizarro's PolitiComedy-A-Go-Go asks its audience to actually think, and laugh while doing it. Offbeat comedians Jeff Kreisler and Brian Malow (Michael Capozzola, a fourth comic, couldn't appear in this New York show) were well-chosen by Mr. Piraro to join him in combating the "manure du jour" coming out of the White House. Bizarro's PolitiComedy -A-Go-Go began touring at the start of the Election year, showing its nerve by scheduling the first show in Texas. The show has since toured all over the country, including Boston during the Democratic Convention. What makes Bizarro's PolitiComedy-A-Go-Go so special is that it allows us to mock the most absurd and frightening events happening in our country without ever losing sight of the dire situation we're in. Mr. Piraro shared some of his hysterical solutions to our terrible problems including making Middle America its own country of "Dumbistan" and dubbing the new term "Radireclicon" for those radical religious conservatives. Before introducing his comedy team he whipped out a black and white cartoon guitar and proceeded to croon us a ditty to set up the whole night, ending with the all-too-telling lyrics, "with a Bush and a Dick we all get screwed." Jeff Kreisler was up next, came out, surveyed the intimate late-night audience in the little theater and confided to us that we were "going behind the comedy tonight." Mr. Kreisler's comedy style had a wonderful, dark theatrical approach that had himself at times being interrupted by his alter ego of his higher-pitched microphone, cracking the whole room up. Intensely funny, Brian Malow's humor hit home with some of the most disturbing thoughts of the evening, like needing to be a serial-killer profiler to get into the heads of the administration. The crowd was brought from an eruption of laughter to horror when he explained that a joke he just told mocking Bush's "slender grasp of the English language" was actually one he had written about Dan Quayle years ago. What was especially unique about the whole evening was the group's painful honesty in its reaction to where the country is going. This honesty recognized that we had no choice but to laugh about these issues, while never losing sight of the issues themselves, provoking some interesting questions about our responsibility as American citizens. Each performer was never afraid to tell a joke, and then remind us: wow, that's incredibly depressing, isn't it? Mr. Piraro told us that it was "champagne or hemlock" for his team at the end of their tour, depending on election results. For all of us, here's hoping we can dump out that nasty goblet and pop the cork this November, Bizarro style. Crystal Skillman is a playwright whose plays include "Flow" and "Ballad of Phineas P. Gage," both commissioned by E.S.T/Sloan. This summer, "4 Edges" was produced by Amphibian Productions, her musical "That's Andy" workshopped at Northern Stage and "Warrior" won Best Adaptation at the Prague International Puppetry Festival. "Bizarro's
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