Ho & Mo: Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney in their signature routine as a lonely
man and woman in a country-and-western bar.
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By STEVE WEINSTEIN
Friday, June 25, 2004
The first tip-off of Kathy Najimy and Mo Gaffney’s appeal came when I scanned
the audience. That Kathy and Mo should have such a strong appeal to lesbians,
despite their coy refusals to discuss their sexuality, should not come as a surprise.
After all, Dame Edna and Eddie Izzard are the queerest comedians out there, and
both are happily heterosexual.
“Kathy and Mo’s Greatest Hits” pretty much plays as it sounds — a
reprise of the sketches that brought both women fame in the ‘80s. The
best-known involves Najimy as a drunken man half-heartedly attempting to pick
up Mo (as a loose divorcee) in a country-and-western bar.
All stand-up comedy these days falls into two categories. There’s the
foul-mouthed, politically tinged spawn of Lenny Bruce (Chris Rock, Margaret
Cho, Sandra Bernhard); and the kinder, gentler progeny of Bob Newhart and Bill
Cosby, who joke about family and everyday peeves (George Lopez, Jerry Seinfeld,
Ellen Degeneres).
Kathy and Mo stand somewhere in the middle of the two comic schools, leaning
slightly toward the gentle. Their material arises out of their origins in the
hectic, makeshift San Francisco comic melting pot of the late ‘70s and
early ‘80s, where Haight-Ashbury street theater met Castro gender-bending
camp.
A sketch that asks how men would react if they had menstrual periods shows
the duo’s strengths and weaknesses. As funny as it is (and it is funny),
it is only one of a long chain of such gender-switching routines. Reno, for
example, does a riff on her reactions when they had to stuff a sock in her
crotch in preparation to play a man on stage. And then there those endless “what
if men got pregnant” numbers?
Two outer-borough gumba teens watching “West Side Story” starts
promisingly enough. (“It’s like … It’s like ‘Romeo
and Juliet,’ you know?”) but meanders off into stereotypes that
were tired even before “Married to the Mob” and “The Sopranos” got
to them.
The first-act closer, about two matrons who are taking avant-garde feminist
classes at the local university extension and meet their classmates at a vegetarian
restaurant, trades in the Julia Richman Lawng Eyelint stereotype. A sudden
serious turn to one woman’s digression about her son’s lover, who
has AIDS, is discomfitingly out of place. (Najimy, it should be noted, has
been a tireless worker for AIDS — and animal-rights — groups in
her private life.)
The curtain raiser for the second act is unarguably the show’s nadir.
That it is also the only new material is not a good sign for the future of
the act. A 12-step program for maligned mothers of characters in Walt Disney
cartoons, it plays as badly as it sounds.
Even aside from kooky 12-step programs as an unfortunate staple of sketch
comedy, the characters’ situations are uninteresting and the choices
of styles bizarre. The Little Mermaid’s mom, for example, is an Ethel
Merman impersonation, presumably to pun on “Ethel Mermaid.”
A cutaway between a blue-collar woman who wants a facelift and a pampered
Beverly Hills matron, however, cuts to the bone as an effective critique
of society’s emphasis on youth and good looks. And the last country
bar skit is pretty near perfection.
If you’re a fan — and the night I saw “Greatest Hits,” the
audience seemed to be able to recite or anticipate all of the lines — you’ll
have a great time. But, despite their obvious professionalism, stage presence
and often-hilarious mannerisms, some of the material has become hopelessly
dated.
The worst problem, however, is that each sketch simply goes on to long. The
essence of sketch comedy is: quick cuts, bam-bam jokes, blackout, the end.
The funniest material pokes gentle fun at knee-jerk feminism, as in the scene
in the restaurant where two “womyn” poets spew incoherent invective.
Kathy Najimy has established her persona — in films like “Sister
Act” and as the voice of Peggy on “King of the Hill” — as
a flat-accented American Everywoman. I’ll always have a place in my heart
for Mo Gaffney’s berserk recurring character in “Ab Fab” as
a New Age California minister. But if they’re going to team up again,
I’d like to see them bring in some newer and more cutting-edge material.
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