Joey Maranto, a stand-up comedian, tells here the story of a failed stand-up comedian, failed improv performer, and failed children’s entertainer for a Christian television show (all the same person) who revenged himself for the show’s cancellation by working in a large number of mildly smutty double-entendres to the final production. If you wonder what I mean by “mildly smutty double-entendres”, look at the show’s title.
Before he gets to the meat of his story, Maranto’s character gives us a discourse on the rise and fall of stand-up comedy in the eighties: what it was like to show up for auditions, what the dream of every stand-up comic was (having a show like Seinfeld’s) and how frequently that dream was disappointed (very frequently).
As comedy declines, Maranto’s character turns to improv, and with three other ex-stand-ups, forms a troupe. As he describes his partners, it may strike you that he has discovered a new art form: stand-up tragedy. One has problems with his wife; another has problems with his mum; a third is prone to excess and addiction. Improbably, Rising Gospel, a Christian network, decides that these four would be perfect to host their Children’s Christian Television Show — a “glorious and wholesome” show, hence the title of Maranto’s piece.
These four burnouts hosting a Christian kiddie show might be fertile ground for comedy, but that’s not where Maranto goes with this. Instead, after some success, they are eclipsed by The Wiggles (TM), a troupe of Australian musicians who specialize in children’s music. So, as is the case in all such instances, the network gives them the ax. The revenge plot ensues.[ezcol_1third]
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Meet the Glory Wholes
closes July 28, 2018
Details and tickets
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Maranto tells all this with a rapid-fire delivery, tense and breathless even during moments in the story which are neither. In the production I saw, he seemed nervous and missed several lines, notwithstanding the generally friendly and encouraging audience. Some of this was doubtlessly due to opening-night jitters, and I expect things will get better and smoother over time. But some of it may have been a need to deliver a lengthy and complicated story within the allotted time limit, exacerbated by the Fringe’s historic intolerance for shows which run over. A more successful, and less nerve-wracking, approach to this dilemma might be to examine the text for material which is tangential to the story and, in the words of William Faulkner, “kill the darlings.”
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Meet the Glory Wholes, written and performed by Joey Maranto . Reviewed by Tim Treanor.
