Long Story Short Broadway Reviews

While full-length stand-up acts tend to jump from place to place, Quinn and Seinfeld have worked with skill to shape the material into a fluid discourse in the manner of monologists such as Spalding Gray or Mike Daisey.

In a country where more and more people get their news from Jon Stewart, what's so unthinkable about getting our world history from Colin Quinn? To say we could do worse - a lot worse - is meant only as praise for 'Colin Quinn: Long Story Short,' the mostly smart and shrewd little stand-up comedy/psychopolitical history lesson.

There's no wall to be seen in Long Story Short, aside from the Great One. ('Work was China's drug. The one thing they couldn't figure out was how to stop working. That's why the Great Wall is so long. I'm sure it started off as just a wall. The next biggest wall in the world is fourteen feet long. Any other place, a contractor gets to that length and says, 'You don't need more than that, do you?') Quinn and Seinfeld try hard to banish the spectre of Caroline's from the intimate Helen Hayes (where the comic's first Broadway outing, Colin Quinn: Irish Wake, played over a decade ago).

Directed by his pal Jerry Seinfeld, Long Story Short has no production values to speak of (though a Google-maps-style geographical slide show provides a nice visual accent) and doesn't exactly prove that stand-up comedy belongs on Broadway. But until something better comes along, it's state-of-the-art.

I found myself laughing through 80 percent of the show. It's also one of the most erudite acts I've ever encountered. How many comics would include references to the Holy Roman Empire, the Silk Road, and the difference in speech habits of East and West Africans? In the cleverest bit, Quinn compares the state of the world to a bar at 3:30 a.m. Everybody's drunk and ready for a fight, and America's acting like 'the alcoholic, drug-addict brother of Canada. He's even spilling his drink in the Gulf of Mexico.'

But Long Story doesn't pretend to offer sophisticated social analysis, any more than it asks us to take literally its caricatures. Some of its smartest and funniest moments arrive when Quinn steps out of the historical period that he's documenting.

The evening's themes are not exactly new. That humankind has been consumed in mayhem and folly ever since we started walking upright - and probably even before - is obvious to anybody who's glanced at a history book. Our propensity for destruction has been a source of cackling amusement at least since Aristophanes and the age of classical comedy. But if Mr. Quinn's ideas aren't novel, they're definitely immortal. And this easygoing alumnus of'Saturday Night Live' brings his own distinctive every-guy's perspective to the galumphing march of civilization toward - well, toward whatever it is we are approaching, as Blanche DuBois so lyrically put it.

Mr. Quinn is funniest when he's finding unexpected connections. Economists missed the impending collapse, he suggests, because they hold their annual conference in Davos, Switzerland: 'It's Plato's cave theory, which was basically if you live in a cave and all you see are shadows outside, you think that shadows are what's real. So if they hold the economic summit in Switzerland, you walk out of the hotel, 'Hey, things look pretty good. I'll see you next year.''

Spinning through the history of the civilized world in 75 clever minutes, Quinn claims society's bad habits today basically stem from our genetic pool. 'Our ancestors are not the people who starved to death waiting for their turn on line,' he says. Aside from adding some fancier visuals and making a few tweaks to the nicely-shaped text, Quinn and his smart director, Jerry Seinfeld, present the same entertaining show I reviewed last August.

But cramming a couple of thousand years of material into a one-act is no mean feat. He tends to rush, trailing off before he finishes thoughts and sentences. Otherwise, it's a polished act. And with Broadway prices for an act that's just an hour and change, it should be.

I doubt that many middle-school teachers are organizing class trips to see Colin Quinn Long Story Short—the R-rated insults and ethnic humor are strictly for teens—but kids might actually glean something from the material. In 75 minutes, the comedian takes us on a gruffly wiseass tour of Western civilization, emphasizing the rise and fall of empires, from the ancient Greeks to America’s present status as corrupt global cop. Although a history professor would take issue with the soundness of Quinn’s facts and spin, there’s a surprising amount of insight and cleverness between the punch lines.

After seeing Quinn in Long Story Short, it's hard to fathom why the star didn't succeed with his two major post-SNL ventures — the three-episode-long NBC sketch-comedy series The Colin Quinn Show and post-Daily Show political gabber Tough Crowd With Colin Quinn. Perhaps the medium is to blame. Judging by Long Story Short, Quinn seems more in his element on stage.

While Quinn starts off with cavemen, then proceeds to the Greeks, the Romans and so on, history is merely a pretext for loosely connected observations about various ethnic, religious and cultural characteristics. At least Quinn prefers gruff bafflement and old-school Brooklyn attitude to stereotype-based hostilities.