The members of His Majesty, the Baby—Ivy collegians Shon Arieh-Lerer, Nathan Campbell, John Griswold, Andrew Kahn and Max Ritvo—hold strong views on the nature of comedy. What they miss, inexplicably, is that it should be funny. With the exception of a character named Pepsi Garbage—a rude, vain, past-her-prime pitchwoman played by Arieh-Lerer—the sketches are mostly contemptuous of the audience. Take Griswold and Arieh-Lerer, who respond to the crowd’s entrance applause by clapping back snidely. Or a sketch in which Arieh-Lerer begs his son, played by Griswold, first to slap and then kill him; when the son declines, the petulant dad births a new son from his man-womb: Ritvo in a diaper. (That one really laid an egg.) Campbell thrashing through the show’s title song was passable—I liked the backup band, Sister Helen—but there was poor Ritvo again in his nappies, striking Martha Graham poses. Even scenes with promising premises suffer from self-sabotage. Kahn plays Adam, who thinks “traditional marriage” is only possible when a man named Adam marries a woman named Eve; from this potential comedic paradise, however, the writing falls into doggerel. The ending of the show best epitomizes its sophomoric slump. Approach members of the audience, accuse them of being dead and demand that they leave the theater? You got it: mass exodus.—Leonard Jacobs
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