Defending the Caveman
Many of these turn out to be pretty bad, mostly because comedy-club material, with its heavy emphasis on dick jokes, easy sexual stereotypes, and whatever topics happen to be hot on TV, seems all the more superficial and sexist over 90 minutes. This is exactly what derailed Robert Dubac in his The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron. Despite his show’s I’m-a-sensitive-guy title, Dubac’s material turned out to be the same old misogynist shtick (“Women don’t have to think. They know everything”) that’s been floating around clubs since the first fool begged the audience to take his wife, please.
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Ultimately, however, what keeps Becker from being as irritating as a Dubac or Clay is not the quality of his material–it’s his relaxed, intensely winning, likable stage persona. When he says he’s been thinking a lot about men and women and why the sexes have trouble communicating, he exudes so much open-mindedness we believe him. It was only after the show, when I had a chance to think over his material, that I realized how little time Becker spent revealing anything new and how much time he spent reinforcing the same old stereotypes.
