Month: August 2007

After six years, comedians don’t even have to write jokes about President George W. Bush.To them, Bush seems to write his own punchlines into the daily headlines.Which makes being a satirist tougher than ever.“You can’t parody a parody,” Will Durst tells me.“I actually had a Republican come up to me and say I’m really disappointed in you. Bush is low-hanging fruit right now.”Durst has brought his one-man show Off-Broadway to the New World Stages complex. It’s called “The All-American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing,” but it’s really a summation of this San Franciscan satirist’s career. After all, a clips package precedes his entrance onstage, highlighting Durst’s TV appearances dating back to the 1988 campaigns. Then Durst appears, wearing a light summer suit and seated among stacks of newspapers; a pair of boxing gloves to one side, a large Starbucks cup on the other.“This is about me and my abandonment issues,” he says.He claims his show is about questioning how and why politicians have gone to polarizing extremes, abandoning the political center. “We’re all purple people,” he says.Most of his barbs come at the expense of the current Republican administration, and after a preview show, he tells me that his act is a culmination of “the last six and a half years bubbling up — that’s what it is, because it’s fermented, and the cork is going to pop pretty soon.”He...