The Make Comedy Great Again Tour stars, from left, Tina Giorgi, Jeff Allen, Earl David Reed, Brad Upton and Ross Bennett.
ALBANY — Despite its obvious echo of a decidedly partisan slogan, the "Make Comedy Great Again" Tour promises that it will be an evening of five comics who work in an older tradition, namely one free of politics and vulgarity.
Saturday's show at The Egg ran for more than two hours, yet it never got stronger than PG-13 in language and innuendo, and it was a clear hit with a freely laughing audience that had an age range as broad as any I've seen for stand-up comedy, from about a kid about 11 to a couple in their 70s.
Even before the national exposure of the special, interest in MCGA has been so strong that the tour, produced by The Comedy Works in Saratoga Springs, is already looking at booking 30 to 40 weekends' worth of dates next year, according to owner Tommy Nicchi.
The comedians' material isn't explicitly political, but it is fundamentally conservative, in the larger sense of the word.
On the stage this manifested itself in a pair of grandpa personas: Brad Upton as the genial, slightly goofy one who's younger than his age and Jeff Allen as the only-62-but-already-a-geezer guy who walks effortfully and complains about his declining health and about everyone in his life. For Upton, getting older means sitting in the mall food court and staring longingly at plates going by, not the attractive young women carrying them. While this is to him a sign of deterioration, it's representative of MCGA that Upton would never consider that the food-carrying women think it's a major improvement. Allen is more explicitly sour, having crossed over into that late-middle-age period where men are so hen-pecked that it gets a big laugh when Allen says something like, "I've been married 32 years, so it's not like I'm a man anymore anyway."
If they're the grumpy gramps of the tour, Ross Bennett is the weird uncle, with sproingy hair, thick glasses and a persona he describes as "the science teacher that (all the students) suspected smokes pot." Though sentimentality was thickest with Bennett, it was also gentlest, culminating with a hilarious set-closing routine about sledding, the differences between toboggans and flying saucers and being mummified in scarf wrapped around his head so many times that it felt as if his mother was planning to pull-start a lawnmower.
Absolutely necessary to this mix is the ostensible opener/emcee, David Earl Reed, a black comic and morning-radio host in York, Pa., who is supremely skilled at zinging white audiences just up to their comfort levels. In a set that was as long as each of the others', Reed was masterful in his crowd work, riffing brilliantly on interactions with the audience, from late-comers to a monosyllabic 20something who, when asked about his career, said only, but enthusiastically, "Concrete!"
Noting a black-white interracial couple sitting near the front, Reed said, "You know what they say: Once you go black ...."
He trailed off, letting the audience mentally fill in what they thought was coming. What he actually said was far more pointed than a a rhyming, sexually based cliché: "Once you go black, your family leaves."