No seriously, put down
that spear

>> JFL’s Defending the Caveman is an obvious
and passé comedy about gender roles

by AMY BARRATT

Back in the olden, golden days of early television, the new medium tried its best to reproduce the experience of live theatre. Nowadays, a certain kind of commercial theatre goes out of its way to replicate the bland inoffensiveness of network sitcoms. Its goal is to attract the vast demographic that inexplicably loves Raymond.

Defending the Caveman is one such commodity. It premiered at the Just For Laughs Festival last week, 16 years after it was first performed by its author, stand-up comic Rob Becker, in San Francisco. Not that Becker was anywhere to be found in Montreal. JFL’s Caveman is one of many identical franchises delivering its message to the four corners of the earth.

It’s a message that, when Becker first thought it up around 1988, must have seemed pretty fresh and original: Because of their prehistoric roles as hunters (men) and gatherers (women), the two sexes have evolved differently. It’s as if they’re from two different cultures.

Yeah, or planets. Becker started performing the show before John Gray’s Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus was published. Even when he took his fake stone armchair and TV set to Broadway in 1994, that book had yet to become the pop culture touchstone it is today.

Becker took it upon himself to debunk a feminist gender analysis dating from the ’70s and ’80s. By 2007, even the feminists have moved on, admitting that gender differences aren’t simply the result of social conditioning. Finer stand-up comics have also moved on from bits about guys hogging the remote and women loving to shop, but for Defending the Caveman, time has stood still.

In his “play” (really an extended stand-up routine), Becker relates personal anecdotes from his life and marriage, so when another performer steps in—in this case Canadian Michael Van Osch—he has two choices, each reeking of inauthenticity: he can play the piece pretending to be Rob Becker, or, he can pretend to be talking about his own experiences. The producers have chosen the latter. So, Van Osch substitutes his own name and that of his partner when relating stories that Becker wrote about his wife. Even an opening video sequence has been re-shot with Michael and Karen replacing Rob and Erin. The implication is that all fortyish heterosexual couples are interchangeable.

There must be married people out there who are offended by this lowest common denominator dreck, but they certainly weren’t at the opening night of Defending the Caveman. On the contrary, seeing the jokes coming a mile off, straight down the middle of the road, seemed to make the audience feel happy, and a little bit squishy inside.

Just For Laughs knows they can get sold out houses by booking this kind of product, so why wouldn’t they? I don’t know, maybe because the festival is supposed to showcase what’s happening in comedy now, as opposed to what might have seemed funny a decade and a half ago? It would be nice to think that Montreal audiences would be sophisticated enough to stay away, but having already bludgeoned the material in packed houses from Australia to Israel, Korea to Estonia, the Caveman will almost certainly kill here too.

Defending the Caveman
every night until July 22 (except for july 16),
8 p.m., at Centaur Theatre (453 St. FranÇois-XAVIER),
$39.50. for more info, call:
(514) 845-2322 or (514) 288-3161