Durst hits his targets, a bit awkwardly
If you’ve seen political comedian Will Durst perform before, you might have heard him give a variation on a joke about how some embarrassment of a politician has been an embarrassment of riches for Durst’s own career as a satirist. Even when that politician was George W. Bush, as it was for a while in Durst’s stand-up and solo shows, that punch line felt self-congratulatory and tone-deaf, as if to say, “I know all of you are suffering, but this guy has been great for me!”
So it feels all the more inauspicious when an early line in “Durst Case Scenario,” which opened Tuesday, Aug. 1, at the Marsh, makes a similar crack about our 45th president — as if, in these terrifying times, we could possibly care about how much he’s profited as a comic.
But if the opening segments of Durst’s latest one-man show misfire, with lazy humor about weed, “Westworld,” the Giants and the Folsom Street Fair, give him some time. Eventually, “Durst Case Scenario” becomes something more profound: a step back from the dizzying barrage of headlines; a sharp accounting of just how bad things really are and how we got here, all the way back to the Iowa caucus, which feels like another lifetime even though it was just last year; a rage-fueled aria, shorn of any pretense or gimmick, from an unkempt man who doesn’t care about niceties any more.
In one of Durst’s wisest lines of the night, he briefly abdicates his role as a satirist, ceding the floor to our absurd political climate itself and his audience’s own image of it, of ourselves, of how history might evaluate us. It doesn’t get a laugh; it’s too sobering. “The 45th president of the United States is Donald Trump,” he says, pausing for effect.
the joke.” Stalking about the stage and taking swigs from a cup of Peet’s, Durst has eschewed his usual suit for an untucked oxford and Tshirt that reads “mildly nauseous.” He’d read like a batty recluse, except for his easy informality with his audience and his use of an Algebra I-style overhead projector, which he uses to draw graphs and show unfortunate photos of denizens of the West Wing circus. It isn’t so much that he breaks the fourth wall, because there was never a wall to begin with. He’s like that cool government teacher in whose classroom you never felt like you had to raise your hand, even though it never would have occurred to you to interrupt his incisive yet discursive ravings anyway.
Durst hits a range of targets, from “low-information voters” to Ben Carson, and if his jabs at Trump and other Republicans are like candy for a San Francisco audience, he reserves some of his most pointed barbs for the left, which he rightly accuses of spinelessness.
It’s not just a cathartic evening, but a galvanizing one (even if he makes some more missteps late in the piece, with a sexist dig at the first lady). In an era when our leaders’ disgraces daily merit extralarge headline fonts, our shame is blunted, numbed. We can no longer feel this scourge as acutely as our consciousnesses tell us we ought to. Durst, with his clear eye and his long view, helps bring us back to ourselves. It’s up to us what to do next.
“Durst Case Scenario” becomes a step back from the dizzying barrage of headlines.