Rhonda Hansome asking, “Can you believe it?”
Whether there will actually be any indictment remains highly speculative. But you might glean a modicum of excitement, and a laugh or three, from Indictment Excitement, the political standup fest now being presented at Theater 555, with a rotating roster of comics.
That’s all it is, a stool and a mike, and a rear screen that doesn’t do anything. No script, no director; the producing company is Laughing Liberally, a venerable New York–based consortium of lefty comedians. There’s also a title song, by SoHee Youn and Jamie Jackson, that serves to get the audience in the mood for some political roistering. At the night I attended, the emcee, who also performed the opening act, was Rhonda Hansome, a hardworking writer-director-standup artist who likes to punctuate her political commentary with “Can you believe it?” and “Isn’t that amazing?” and such. She might have gotten more of a response if she’d just dialed back a bit.
Scott Blakeman talks about being a liberal Jew.
The comics were, happily, not just into roasting potential indictee Donald Trump, which, welcome as it was to most of the half-full house, would have become monotonous if that’s all they did. Hansome’s follow-up act, Dean Obeidallah, did some standard but funny riffs on the New York experience, as well as growing up Palestinian-Sicilian—ripe terrain for ethnic humor. The recipient of more than $4 million in a 2019 neo-Nazi libel suit, he riffed on that too, mainly on the way that distant friends and relatives come out of the woodwork when they find out you’ve just won $4 million.
Next up was Scott Blakeman, whose one-man show is called Liberal Jew, and he delivered a lot of liberal-Jewish palaver. He also had some amusing side trips into the current Republican disarray, and the difficulty of the party retaining its base without alienating everybody else; maybe, he offered, the GOP should have a “White Supremacist Sale.” He also divulged the difference between white supremacists and white nationalists: “A white nationalist is a white supremacist with low self-esteem.”
The two wrap-up acts might have been the best, and certainly were the least Trump-obsessive. Mehran Khaghani, an Iranian from London who is now based in Boston, had some hilarious riffs on being gay and Iranian (“Ahmedinejad said it wasn’t possible—well, ha, ha!”), and some funny stuff on artificial intelligence and the fate of the Mar-a-Lago documents.
Charles McBee, riffing on more than Trump. Photographs by Richard Hillman.
Charles McBee, a Comedy Central writer and a fixture on New York’s club circuit, riffed merrily on student loans (“I’m happy to say, I’m done paying back my loans. Oh, I still owe plenty, but I’m done paying them back”), how the presidency ages people (“Obama went in looking like Denzel Washington and came out like Morgan Freeman”), and Ron DeSantis’s attempt to intimidate New Yorkers by sending us busloads of immigrants” (“A bus in New York filled with immigrants, we just call … a bus”).
The cast is going to keep changing, and you may want to check ahead to see when “Special Guest” Judge Andrew Napolitano appears. He’s a conservative judge who put in years at Fox News, but eventually veered leftward and got tossed off that network. You might also catch John Fugelsang, Jim David, Negin Farsad, Ophira Eisenberg, Calvin Cato, Carole Montgomery, Keith Price, or—and I’m sorry I missed her, but she’s returning for four performances—Judy Gold. The material will presumably shift and update, but the vibe, stridently anti-Trump and mostly good-natured within those parameters, probably won’t. There’s so much to worry liberal laughers these days, and an evening of political stand-up among like-minded satirists, if not a solution to anything, is at least a salve. And, at 20 bucks a throw, a bargain.
Indictment Excitement runs through Nov. 5 at the Theater 555 (555 W. 42nd St.). Evening performances are at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; matinees are at 3 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are available by visiting theater555.venuetix.com.
