The Second City comic team on display at the Kennedy Center for The Second City’s Almost Accurate Guide to America is a good one. Ryan Asher, Marla Ceceres, Tyler Davis, Sayjal Joshi, Andrew Knox, and Ross Taylor are all excellent comic actors, with impeccable timing, quick wits, and charming stage personalities. The show is well-directed by Billy Bungeroth and the performance runs smoothly and cleanly.
The only problem is the actual material.
Structured as something of an ode to the peculiarities of American social and public life (the scenes are broken by little interludes of quintessentially American pop—Springsteen’s “Sherry Darling,” for instance or Tom Petty’s “American Girl”), the show is ostensibly apolitical, intent on skewering and celebrating all facets of American culture, both left and right. The underlying liberalism is utterly transparent, however—there are a few jokes at cultural leftism (prissy teenagers worked up over gluten, white liberals viewing the whole panorama of life through the matrix of identity politics), but none at political leftism (save for a few harmless quips at Bernie Sanders). On the other hand, the show is equally willing to criticize cultural conservatism (the standard mockery of flag-loving, “USA”-chanting, God-worshipping, white Middle America) and political conservatism.
At their worst, these gags are painfully obvious and deeply unfunny. One, for instance, involves a Cupid who has been bought off by the National Rifle Association and brandishes a handgun instead of his trademark bow-and-arrows. Need I say more? The whole conceit of the sketch doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The idea, I take it, is that the NRA has bought off Cupid as some sort of a marketing ploy. But homicidal gun-maniac Cupid would be a terrible advertisement for the NRA! And if guns are hazardous in the hands of Cupid, is his old bow-and-arrow set really that much better? The sketch is nothing more than a ham-handed dig at politicians who are “bought off” by the NRA. But it’s barely even that—like too much else, it reduces to a tired old political advertisement wrapped in the meanest packaging of a joke.
While there are a few other moments as heavy-handed and colossally unfunny as the Cupid sketch (a rap battle involving the “Notorious RBG”; a satire on the Koch Brothers), the political jokes in the show more often tend toward a rather dull recitation of liberal tropes. They’re not particularly offensive, not particularly funny and, surprisingly, not particularly timely. Is the Year of Trump really the time to cast the GOP as the “paradox pro-life, pro-war party” or to wring hands over how presidential elections are inevitably bought by rich donors?
Of Trump himself, there is not terribly much to be said. There is the inevitable impression, done capably by Andrew Knox, and the usual slew of jokes about how Trump looks like a sweet potato or a pumpkin—not to mention the subtle class ribbing (look how tasteless Trump is!) that probably helped him win the Republican nomination. But Trump is a difficult subject for imitation—the man is such a self-parody that there simply isn’t much space to mock him, and the world of contemporary comedy is saturated with Trump impressions, both good and bad. Knox does a fine job, but it’s not terribly memorable.
As with many things, the Second City crew is at its worst when it deals with politics. When given a bit of space to get away from politics and towards their more traditional comic material—culture, relationships, life—they generally do a fine job and their comic instincts help save several sketches that would be simply intolerable in worse hands. A “What’s Your Privilege” game that involves winnowing the audience down until only a very few exemplars of total privilege are left (white, male, Christian, affluent, middle-aged, etc.) sounds unbearable on paper. But on stage, it was simply good-humored and enjoyable banter between the cast and their audience-selected representative of prosperous white America.
Likewise, one of the Trump-related sketches depicts an American family going through a simple morning routine in different eras (2016, 1980, 1947) in a drive to reconstruct the old “great” America that Trump longs for. In the wrong hands, this would be disastrous, and it nearly is—a tired reduction of history to better technology and more progressive politics. But it’s easy to forget about the bland political message, watching the cast delight in mocking the cultural norms and technological contexts of both the past and the present. And because it ends up being less about politics and more about social life, the actors milk a lot of good comedy out of the routine.
Overall, the performance is an uneven one, oscillating between embarrassingly pointed political comedy and the more organic, funnier improv and sketch routines that Second City excels in when the burden of topicality is removed. It’s far from the best Second City can do, but there’s no shortage of comic talent in the room, and it would be a modestly entertaining evening out.
Max Bloom is a student at the University of Chicago and an intern at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
