A Thousand Clones (pun)

Written by Andy Borowitz '80 and Jackie Osherow '78

Produced by Diane Nabatoff '78 and Peter Lombard '78

Music composed by Fred Barton '80

Directed and choreographed by Judith Haskell

Hasty Pudding Theatricals' 130th annual production

Through March 23

The year is 1978. Henny Youngman has lapsed into senility; "Can You Top This?" has gone the way of "Leave It to Beaver," and the Harvard Lampoon has been bought by Larry Flynt, who promises to turn it into a "mostly serious" fundamentalist humor magazine. Rife preprofessionalism, proto-professionalism and postprofessionalism have sent Harvard's aspiring humorists packing off to Lamont, Baker and Langdell for the execution of life's harsh sentence: NO MORE FUNNY BUSINESS, KIDS. There are only 100 jokes left on the planet Earth, produced and sustained in a Harvard p-3 laboratory with a secret fluid extracted from the funny bone of Mark O'Donnell [before he did that silly piece in New Times]. An underground group of renegade "funny" students--all of whom remember the good old days of Padan Aram, The University Enquirer, and Stephen S.J. Hall--decide they'd like to put on a humorous show in order to raise enough money to go to Bermuda. When, in desperation, they go on a mad rampage through the tired symbols of American cultural bankruptcy--Easy-Off, Mopeds, McDonald's hamburgers, pre-meds--they suddenly realize that they can do it without the formula. They can do it all with mirrors, through an intriguing process called "joke-cloning." They assemble in the dank, tomb-like basement of Harvard's newly-egalitarian Hasty Pudding Club, and, armed only with a dog-eared copy of "Boy's Life" and two pirated video-cassettes of outlawed Johnny Carson monologues, set to work. Reviving a centuries-old tradition, they begin plucking young, impressionable lads from off the street and from the upstairs billiards room, and decking them out in wigs, cute tights and mirrors. They begin to parcel out the puns--"One to a customer, for starters"--and an amazing chain reaction begins. By the time the dust settles, the proliferating puns have assembled themselves into a SHOW, and forthwith commence forming a kickline. Someone pulls out a flute. Someone else pulls out an oboe. Someone else pulls out a drum set. OF THEIR OWN VOLITION, as if they had lives of their own, the puns arrange themselves into songs, into dances. Poppa Cork, the aging curator of the Hasty Pudding building, comes downstairs to see what's the matter.

The scene that confronts Poppa brings a tear to his eye. "I almost thought you guys wouldn't be able to bring it off this time without resorting to something illegal," he muses. "But now I know that out there somewhere, Morey Amsterdam is smiling."

"Bermuda, here we come!!" the kids shout in unison, as they commence painting flats and making costumes, two activities which have not yet been banned under the draconian enactments of Post-Industrial Society.

.....

A THOUSAND CLONES was my very first Hasty Pudding Show. I spent four weeks looking forward to seeing it, one hour being jostled by opening-nighters and plainclothes policemen waiting for it to begin, one hour of the first act chuckling quietly to myself, the remaining 45 minutes of the first act attempting to revive my two completely numb legs, and the second act in 33 Dunster St. I chickened out. I spent much of that restless night dreaming the post-mortem dream reprinted above. Now, three days later, I offer no excuses except the following good ones: 1) My legs, as I have already pointed out, had fallen almost irretrievably asleep. 2) I was growing just a trifle annoyed at the folks sitting next to me--management "plants," I reckoned, the magnitude of whose outbursts of laughter stood in inverse proportion to that the of the rest of the audience; when a line simply wasn't funny, they'd purposely laugh, look wild-eyed at each other, and exclaim, "Brilliant! Just brilliant!" 3) They were drinking champagne throughout the performance, and its smell, too, began to get to me after a while. 4) The theater was too hot for me. 5) I was the "odd man out" in a room which contained penguin clones and one self-proclaimed "critic" in a tan polyester suit. 6) Shortly after the second joking reference was made to McDonald's "fallen arches," I realized that I had already logged more time in the theater that evening than I had spent on my senior thesis all semester. 7) The clincher came when I ran into two friends--Janice, with whom I had gone to high school, and Marguerite, her current roommate--who had paid $20 each to catch a glimpse of Richard Dreyfuss, and a taste of what Harvard theater was all about. They hadn't even seen Dreyfuss, but were nonetheless preparing to beat a Hasty Pudding Retreat to the egress at intermission. Marguerite asked the inevitable question: "Is this what all Harvard shows are like?" Mumbling something to the effect that she had missed the point of these affairs entirely, I followed her out the door.

It doesn't take a Harvard education or membership in the Signet Society to tell you that what goes on in the Hasty Pudding Show is sort of the antithesis of "legitimate" musical comedy; that you're not supposed to go in expecting anything other than what you got the year before, in a snazzy, schmaltzy new package; that a lot of people around here like to go the show every year for the same reason they like to sit through the Harvard-Yale game every year ("School Spirit," "Tradition," "Water on the Brain"); that, my dream notwithstanding, there are always more puns where that came from; that the audience is usually probably slosho enough to giggle its way through the Apocalypse (believe it or not, this actually happens, this year, in Act I, Scene Seven--count 'em--Seven); and that the Crimson critic does his part every year by saying unkind things about the show--a silly and futile endeavor since the show always sells out anyway (which is more than we can say for The Crimson, right?).

So before I go any further (have I gone far enough already?) I'll indulge in one--possibly obnoxious--disclaimer. I have almost always hated critics in general, and have never aspired to theater criticism myself. Hence, this is not really a review. I also admit that I have no quibble with the existence, raison d'etre, purpose, acceptability, or execution of this or any other Hasty Pudding Theatrical production. Quite the contrary: I found what I saw of A Thousand Clones to be a spiffily gotten-up, lively and reasonably humorous piece of light, if overlong, entertainment. Its authors did an admirable job of adapting their considerable skills to what impressed me as a surprisingly rigid and depressingly self-limiting format: Harvard may be a many-splendored place, but as Johnny Carson quickly learned about Southern California, it's only good for--tops--100 intrinsically funny words (like "Hot Breakfast," "Burbank," "Mather House," "Oxnard" and "premed") which can therefore be thrown right at audiences without the benefit of a joke-vehicle (i.e.--story-cum-punchline) and still elicit Big Laffs. Given that constraint, and given the fact that it was largely ignored by the Pudding People this year, the show couldn't help but become the Leviathan that almost did me in; you really gotta learn how to stop just before Doc Severinson and the NBC Orchestra start playing "Tea for Two." And you don't recover by screaming out "Oxnard! Oxnard! Oxnard!" in a crowded theater until you're blue in the face, either. So my only cavil is with 14 scenes--at least seven too many, and each one of those remaining about four puns too long.

THIS YEAR'S installment of America's oldest ongoing response to Kabuki featured the usual raft of pretty boys in leotards, tennis-ball halves and wigs, playing pretty girls with puns instead of names ("Jemima Fysmoke," "Cybil Service"), whose stock-in-trade is the Big Pun ("You made an asteroid out of yourself!"). Or, alternately, the Silly Joke ("Don't Be a Dope Head, Buy a Moped"). Or, alternately, the Cliche ("Let's Do It"); it's 2078, after all. As far as I could discern from the production notes, the main plot-line consists of a mad grab by three Human Cliches (or were they Human Puns?)--a Harvard student, a Man/Woman from Outer Space, and a Diabolical Villain with Madison Avenue Experience--for the right to be the last person cloned on Earth, and cloned with a vengeance at that--1000 times, hence the title. A "big push" for conventional sex, which either has been--or is about to be--completely supplanted by the more efficient, and presumably less sloppy, process of cloning (or by appearing in Hasty Pudding productions), provides a convenient series of zany sub-plots.

Even though my opinions on such matters should matter little to you, I felt that the costumes, designed by Lindsay Davis '75 and Alison Taylor, were very impressive, glittery and colorful. The dance numbers (in the first act, at least) lacked a certain pizzazz (although the '50s-style "T.V. Love" song-dance combo was a show-stopper, and I'm told that the disco-oriented "Travolta-clone" scene in Act II was equally memorable). And while all of the actors did creditable jobs within the horrible confines of the format, there were a number of unquestionable standouts (at least in Act I): Shipley Munson as the aforementioned squeakyvoiced space-person named Xeno Phobia, Michael Der Manuelian as the slick and sleazy Otto Beolaw, Stephen Hayes as the seductive and slinky Giovanna Dance, and Willy Falk (Betty Won't--get it??)--my personal favorite--as the wacky robot R2E2. (To those actors who undoubtedly stood out in Act II: I offer my apologies for not having stuck around.)

Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Most conventional reviewers would long before now have lapsed into an annoying account of this (or any) show's funniest scenes and most memorable lines; I'll be charitable and leave that for some other time, because I really don't want to spoil it for you in any way. The Hasty Pudding Show, as a friend rightly pointed out, is, after all, the longest-running, most extensively reviewed "sure thing" at Harvard every year--a great, vaguely theatrical experience for those hundred or so Bermudabound Fortunates who are directly involved, and, apparently, a reasonable amount of fun for the annual audience of 14,000 as well. And someday, perhaps, somebody Big and Bored will decide that enough has been enough, and will let someone write something real and really funny, and a bit less unwieldy--HPT 230, perhaps. I'll come back then, no matter where I am, and review it; but you still won't have to listen to a word I say, since the review will be done completely with mirrors.

Case cloned.