Fireside chat

Meet Caveman Rob Becker

by Bill Rodriguez

What are you women gonna do with us men? Can't live with us, can't resort to parthenogenesis. Rob Becker has some ideas he'd like to try out on you, when his Defending the Caveman hits town March 21-16 at the Providence Performing Arts Center.

He's worth a listen. After touring the show for nearly four years, the former stand-up comic opened on Broadway in 1995 and made box office history, breaking the records of Lily Tomlin and Jackie Mason for the longest running one-person show.

As the title suggests, Becker's central metaphor is that men are the hunters, women the gatherers, with psychological gender differences hardwired down through the millenniums. Single-mindedly zeroing in on the kill, task oriented to a fault, as opposed to raising the family back at the cave and learning socialization skills.

Becker, 43, is based in northern California and has been married for nearly 14 years to his wife Erin. She's the one who came up with the idea that he write a monologue on how they learned to get along together. After three years of informally studying anthropology, mythology, sociology and psychology, he did just that.

Becker is a burly guy with a ready smile, but no, a club would not look out of place on his shoulder. He sat down recently at PPAC on a publicity swing through town to talk about his show.

Q: So your basic message is that we guys aren't so bad, despite our differences from women?

A: I think what really saying is that if you spend as much time on your relationship, trying to understand your partner, as much as you do trying to change them or blame them, you'll probably have a much better time.

Q: Does that work both ways? It's the guy you put in the hot seat in the show.

A: Well, you know, it's interesting -- I really wrote the show to defend men. I really wanted to explain men. That was my initial goal. I'm a guy, I thought I could explain guys, and I felt very comfortable doing that. What was amazing to me was that shortly after putting the show up I used to go down to the box office, hang out and see what was going on, and I was amazed to see a lot of guys coming there saying, "My wife has told me I have to see the show, otherwise I won't be able to understand her." The most amazing surprise to me was how many women will bring their husbands or boyfriend to see the show feeling like the show explain them just as well as it does the man.

Q: What drove you to create Defending the Caveman?

A: Well, what happened was my wife and I got married. We really thought we were going to be very much alike -- we'd grown up in the '70s, we thought we were beyond gender, we thought we were very androgynous. We used to talk about how we would have a perfect marriage because we would never fight, because we were so much alike. Six months later we were fighting, no way to explain it. The problem is, if you really believe that your object in a relationship is to become exactly alike, every time you get into a fight someone has to the wrong. If we're so alike and were fighting, one of us has to be screwing up. So all your fights become about figuring out who was wrong. Someone has to take the blame, and someone has to change, right? So all our fights were going nowhere, until one day I said, "You know, I don't think it's that I'm wrong in all these fights or we need to find who's at fault. I just think we're different. I think we're like two different cultures."

Men and women make relationships very differently. And when we get together with the opposite sex and try to make a relationship, we get culture clash. We get these misunderstandings, and that's why we're fighting.

For example, we were on a date. We're driving out and she turns to me and says, "How do I look? I look all right?" I look over and she looks great. I say, "Great." She goes, "How come you didn't say so?" I said, "I just did. I said you look great!" She said, "Yeah, but I had to ask you." This idea of being on the spot and being obligated to say something nice is totally foreign to my experience. So the idea of giving somebody a complement I didn't really believe would never occur to me.

Q: When it's all added up, do you think there are more jerks among men than among women?

A: I don't think so. I really don't. I think that this idea that men are defective is an idea that circulates through time. The old Freudian idea was that characteristics that make women women were signs of immaturity and so forth, and to the extent that women could overcome that and become more like men was a sign of being grown up. And now we have the exact opposite. Nowadays all the traits that make a man a man seem to be signs of immaturity, and to the extent that a man can grow up like a woman he's seen to be whole. And I think that both ideas are wrong. I don't think that one is immature and one is immature, I just think that they're different.