You know that scene in Zombieland, when Bill Murray appears and Emma Stone can’t stop cracking up and finally she’s just like, “I’m sorry, he just gets me”?
That’s how I feel about Doug Ba’aser, the star of A Tired Old Whore. The guy is funny. The show is funny. It’s filthy and offensive and there will be moments when you kind of hate yourself for laughing but you keep cracking up. He gets me.
First, let’s state that there is truth in advertising – Ba’aser’s character is, indeed, a tired old whore. Her name is Taffy Pinkerbox and in fact, she is so old and tired she’s retired. The show is Taffy’s oral (heh) memoirs, created because she was told she could make some easy cash.
Taffy is balanced by show director Frank McClain, who plays the straight (again, heh) man to Taffy’s trainwreck. The exasperated director/outrageous star pairing is not a fresh idea, but Ba’aser and McClain more than do it justice. The show is five acts by five different writers and it mostly flows. The only issue I had wasn’t with the disparate voices – Ba’aser unifies them through Taffy’s consistently bawdy persona – but with a tease toward giving Taffy some dignity when she talks about her retirement plans. There’s a hint that she’s moving toward respectability, when she describes her anxiety about the next stage of her life and her desire to return to her given name, but it never quite pays off the way the raunchier comedy bits do.
Highlights included Taffy’s so-earnest-it’s-funny song interludes, the fate of her many celebrity clients, and a seemingly random costume change mid-show that turned out to be one of the funniest bits. (Pro tip: Orange Venue audience members seated to the sides will get a much more… revealing show than folks seated front and center.) If you are offended by jokes about Mexicans, dead celebrities and paraplegics, this is not the show for you. For less-delicate Fringers who want to laugh for pretty much an hour straight, A Tired Old Whore is a must-see.
