Zing! There goes another one-liner, and the audience howls with laughter. The two altercockers onstage are yucky it up, often cackling at their own jokes. They are Gil Faison (Nick Kroll) and George St. Geegland ( John Mulaney), residents of the Upper West Side who have seen better days. The audience enters to the sound of Steely Dan, who are mentioned in the show. Accompanying the ‘70s tunes is a search light which rakes the house. What follows are a lot of in-jokes about the theater, including a neon sign which reads “No Exit,” a lot of crappy theater dialogue is mocked, and even Guy Fieri’s God-awful restaurant doesn’t escape being knocked. To understand the appeal, you must realize that New York outside the theater is just as whack. Not for nothing is there a bum (sorry, homeless person) with a sign that reads “Give me a dollar, or I’ll vote for Trump.” The baggy pants—literally—comics onstage can only be from The Big Apple. Who else would have the cojones to reel off an outrageous comment about the Holocaust, and be rewarded with a big laugh? The title is, not surprisingly, the opening line of several hilarious phone conversations. The moldy looking set is made up of discarded bits and pieces of other Broadway shows. There are hair dryers from Steel Magnolias, a trapdoor from The Diary of Anne Frank, and a staircase from an August Wilson offering with a forgotten title. It’s hard to tell what’s in the script, and what’s improv. They gleefully corpse often, and would have been right at home on “The Carol Burnett Show.” Kroll and Mulaney have a cult following that just won’t quit; their show was perpetually sold out at the Cherry Lane Theater before they took their act to the Great White Way. Their fans fill the theater and totally get whatever is dished out by these denizens of Comedy Central and late night TV. They bring an unmistakable joy to their work, and in this bizarre political year, they actually make sense a lot of the time.
