By Rebecca Rosen Lum
Argus-Courier Staff
For Rick Reynolds, switching the punchline with the set-up gives his routines a poignant staying power.
“I was sitting on the couch reading the newspaper and my son Cooper was watching ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos,’” Reynolds told his audience at the Stage Door Theater. “He likes to watch people get hurt,” adding agreeably, “And, really, who doesn’t?”
After the laughter subsided, he added that apropos of nothing, his son climbed onto the couch, kissed him, and said, “I love you, Daddy.”
Reynolds, whose show “All Grown Up – and No Place to Go,” has just been extended to Sept. 3, is bucking the current trend to toss put downs at an audience like so many hand grenades.
Promotional materials say the show pursues the question, “Who would I rather be: the kid I once was, or the adult I am now?”
Promoted energetically as the next big thing in comedy, Reynolds now enjoys a following. When, a short way into the program he announced, “By the way, I’m Rick Reynolds,” the audience burst into prolonged applause. The 300-seat room was filled for this first of two shows.
It’s considerably less shocking than his first foray, “Only the Truth is Funny,” in which he detailed a painful childhood, his father’s early death, and the abuse of his mother first by a stepfather, then a succession of mates.
In that piece, Reynolds careened sometimes too widely for comfort between moments of jarring starkness and that magic zone where belly laughs and tears meet. This show is seamless, tighter, gaining from the narrower focus of the material.
Reynolds looks all grown up, having eschewed the baggy, gray secondhand suit of “Only the Truth” for a better-fitting gray suit. As he talks, he paces back and forth in the set, an ersatz living room.
He talks about his difficulties with his wife, Lisa, who he tells us he “loves more than anything in the world.”
Turns out that while he was surfing the waves of success that came with “Only the Truth,” she was dry-docked with their baby son, and feeling very much alone. She grew to resent his absences, and he resented her for “raining on my parade.”
Clearly, Reynolds is not after easy laughs. In fact, much of his show is not meant to be funny at all.
At times, the show felt like a combination group therapy/motivational speech, with Reynolds telling the audience that if he and Lisa could overcome their marital troubles, we could overcome ours too.
But his anecdotes about marital sex (“Nothing turns a woman on like badgering”) or the combination of love and worry that parents feel for their children brought tear-wiping howls from the audience.
In his funniest bits, he recounted a session with a marriage counselor, a stand-up performance at a Vacaville prison, and walking in his own front door.
It’s not for kids. There are plenty of references to his pre-Lisa s-e-x life. An endearing bit has him confessing how uncomfortable he was disrobing in front of a woman for the first time.
He has the physical grace of Charlie Chaplin and the rubber face of Sid Caesar, and when he uses his physical skills, such as in role playing a guy who has no qualms about disrobing, the effect is hysterical. One wishes for more of these moments.
While the show perhaps suffered from one too many Bradshaw-like moments of revelation, it is refreshingly heartening. Those who flock to comedy clubs to hear jabs, put-downs and ridicule will find little to laugh at here.
On the other hand, it might awaken a latent sense of humanity. Now, there’s an appealing thought.
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