That’s entertainment! Comedy classics come alive in Now That’s Funny! BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Now That’s Funny! Directed by Bob Colonna. With Bob Colonna, Jan Mariani, and Carl Ruggiero. At Firehouse Theater through March 13.
	Finding the funny It’s about time. Bob Colonna is a very entertaining guy, so his Newport songs and yuks revue at Firehouse Theater has been long overdue. As a longtime audience member around here, I remember with affection a British dance hall revue Colonna directed and performed many years ago. That was after the former Trinity Rep veteran ran the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre, known as TRIST, from 1971 to 1990. When we’ve chatted, as often as not he’s had a new joke to share. (Ask him to tell the one about the philanderer and the basket of snails.) No wonder Bob Colonna got into this line of work. He’s the adopted son of the late Jerry Colonna, the cigar-waggling entertainer of the 1940s and ’50s with the larger-than-life handlebar mustache and goggle-eyed comic persona. Bob first performed with him when he was 15, learning all about comic timing onstage while his knees were knocking. "I did a lot of stuff in high school, a lot of school plays and things like that — I was the class clown, ham, pain-in-the-ass kid," he admits. That’s about what you’d expect, he says, from people who know him. "Dad, he was encouraging in ways," Colonna says. "He taught me some great routines when I was a kid, some bits that he had done. Like I had an Italian dialect routine that I used to do all the time." He is speaking in his East Side living room, surrounded by photographs, many with his father. Leaning against a wall are albums dated with masking tape, lost scrapbooks of clippings from Jerry Colonna’s career that he recently recovered on eBay. (But you can read all about that on these pages after Bob completes a biography of the man, which his publisher expects by the next January.) This time I wanted to talk with Colonna about comedy. He’s been at it quite a while, turning 64 as he did on February 20. Although this is a man who insists, "I’m not funny. You know? I have to really work at it." He watches and admires and steals, he says. The interview is supposed to be about him, but he spends time detailing the comical inventiveness of actor Mark Carter, whom he directed in The Winter’s Tale last year at Firehouse Theater. So what makes for funny? "One thing I learned from doing Shakespeare is that everything has punch lines — see, tragedy has punch lines," he replies. "Tragedy is exactly like comedy: you have to set it up and knock it over." Other modes are exaggeration and the unexpected — although, he points out, "There are a million really good jokes to violate both of those principles, because no one can nail it down." But, he adds, "The greatest movie probably ever made was Young Frankenstein. Because just when you think you know where you are, Mel [Brooks] pulls the rug out again. "Carol Burnett said that comedy is tragedy plus time — you know, what’s horrible in the moment is funny the next day," Colonna observes. "Mel puts it another way. He said: ‘Tragedy is if I cut my finger and I go to Mount Sinai and I have to have stitches. Comedy is if you fall down an open manhole and die — what do I care?’ " What makes for good comedy? Hmmm. Colonna thinks about it some more and comes up with a crucial factor that Trinity Rep founder Adrian Hall was always citing about successful acting in general: honesty. Colonna talks about a comic opportunity in Macbeth that is usually neglected. Macbeth has killed the king and is talking to someone who doesn’t yet know. "Lennox says it’s been a crazy night, we’ve had thunder and the wind tore the roof off our houses. And Macbeth says, ‘It’s a rough night.’ " And the implied sound of a drum thunk punctuates the secret joke. The list goes on. Subverting expectations is the last thing he mentions, with his favorite example. He’s proud of a moment he came up with in The Seagull, in an early ’90s Trinity production, when he tricked the audience. Playing an old man in a wheelchair, after a long pause his hand falls, so we all think he is dead. But then after a beat, we hear: "Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z." Bob Colonna laughs loudly at that memory. As he well deserves to. — B.R.

Did you hear the one about the Trinity Rep veteran, the perky blond actress, and the moon-faced Italian teacher who walk into a firehouse?

The show at Firehouse Theater in Newport, co-produced with NewStage, is titled Now That’s Funny. With actor-comics Carl Ruggiero and Jan Mariani, Bob Colonna is running a sometimes racy but, in his words, "basically PG" comical gamut, from poetry to knockabout slapstick.

If you don’t like silliness, you’d be walking into the wrong place. This is all homage to one-liners and vaudeville routines, the cockamamie stuff that political satire tried to kill off in the 1960s but which remains flourishing like a virus in the imagination of Mel Brooks and junior high school study halls.

In fact, Brooks’s immortal "2000-Year-Old Man" routine with Carl Reiner is one of the high points of the show. (The main mode of transportation back then? Of course — fear!) And as for juvenile humor, you will be solicited to jot down your own favorite knock-knock joke at intermission. If it’s enough of a groaner, Rob Mariani on drums at the back of the stage might even punctuate the punch line with a rim shot, that live-comedy version of the laugh track.

There’s something for everyone — everyone who can stop being a grown-up for a while. We get Shel Silverstein’s twisted poems for morbid children. We get to hear from a two-hours-old baby, who is born with sarcastic intelligence instead of a front tooth. We find out what men really mean as opposed to what they say, such as that "take a break, honey" means "the game is on and the vacuum cleaner is too loud." We learn what Davy Crockett supposedly said once in a speech in Congress as a representative from Tennessee: "I can swallow a congressman whole without choking, if you butter his head and pin his ears back." (Actually, he said Mexican instead of congressman, but why waste a good line from a racist?)

What an edifying evening. Wonder why married women tend to develop weight problems? Well, Mariani informs us, single women come home, see what’s in the refrigerator, and go to bed. Married women come home, look at what’s in the bed, and go to the refrigerator.

They got a million of ’em.

Komedy Klassics are the central offerings — Fred Allen, Bob Hope. Don’t wait for Steven Wright, or even Krusty the Klown. The three jokesters sometimes are reading at music stands, but they are most effective when straying from the lecture set-up. Colonna doesn’t get far into his opening disquisition on Freud’s theory of humor, interrupted as he is by his co-conspirators’ walk-on bits. ("You don’t say," Mariani mutters a few times into a phone as she walks by him. Who was that? "He didn’t say.")

Things come alive with some early ribaldry as Ruggiero steps to the door of housewife Mariani — he is a baby photographer, but she is expecting someone offering surrogate father services ("If I shoot from two or three different angles, I think you’ll be satisfied").

Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man provides the structure for the first half of the show, but the loosey-goosey second half is more successful — anything goes means there’s room for a couple of the world-class classics. Victor Borge’s delightfully physical "Phonetic Punctuation" shows Colonna at his best, relying on actor’s timing and deadpan delivery. He’s a straight man rather than a mugger, after all, which makes him the perfect Abbott to Ruggiero’s exasperated Costello in a "Who’s on First?" rendition that is polished to gleaming hilarity.

Mariani used to perform in the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre back in the 1980s, when Colonna was its artistic director. Her delivery of "A Few Words on Love," by Algonquin roundtable wit Dorothy Parker, is a typically droll treat. Ruggiero teaches Italian at St. Mary Academy in East Providence, and undoubtedly regales them with dialect jokes. With his Play-Doh face and leash-straining enthusiasm, he’s a funny fella.

When this show doesn’t work as well as at other times, a heap ’o fun is being crammed into the wrong-size container. The humor of some comedians is too personality-specific to fit just any gagster. You don’t have to be a wild and crazy guy to deliver a New Yorker comic essay by Steve Martin, but his mock-supercilious sensibility has to shine through. But while that wasn’t Colonna at his most convincing, his humorous Lancashire rhyming story — a dialect poem, actually — and a twanging "Bert and I" down east anecdote were transporting.

Now that’s funny!