Colin Quinn is not a comedian whom you’d describe as “slick.” Wearing rumpled clothing and sporting considerable stubble on his grizzled face, he’s more like a guy sitting next to you at an Irish bar after he’s had a few beers too many, talking your head off about everything that comes to his mind.
The difference is that nearly everything Quinn says, and he says a lot, is both insightful and funny. His new show revolves around the idea that the act of making small talk is the glue that holds society together. If that’s indeed true, and he makes a convincing case, then you could say Quinn is more like a Superglue.
This new solo piece feels looser than such ambitious previous efforts as Unconstitutional and New York Story, which were very funny but threw so much information at you that you felt like there’d be a quiz afterwards. Small Talk belies its title by being no less dense than its predecessors and delivering a non-stop torrent of amusing one-liners and sharp observations about the way human beings interact, both personally, and now more commonly, online. Needless to say, he’s not a fan of the latter.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
“If you post more than five times a day, you should be in a 72-hour psychiatric hold,” he informs us. He also ridicules people’s need for emojis to understand the emotions behind simply expressed written sentiments: “Now, if somebody sends you a text and says ‘I love you’ without three hearts, you’re like ‘This person doesn’t love me.’” And to make everything simpler, he explains, everyone should periodically be rated by friends and family, like a personal Rotten Tomatoes.
In Quinn’s estimation, people are so inept at communicating properly with each other, especially in professional situations, that in the future all cop shows all going to be called not Law and Order or CSI but rather HR. “There are two very important and separate groups in every office,” he intones in a television announcer-style voice. “The sexist pigs and those who are assigned to stop them. These are their stories.”
For Quinn, small talk is essential, a way for people to acknowledge each other’s existence and that we’re all in this thing together. Therefore, anyone who doesn’t know how to, say, chat about the weather, is someone who doesn’t know how to break the ice. That’s the approach he uses with his neighbors when they’re sharing an elevator. Although he slyly adds that, since he’s the one who’s famous, they should be breaking the ice.
Toward the end of the piece, Quinn adds a rare personal touch by talking about his friendship with the late comedian Norm Macdonald, whom he describes as a “master small talker.” He amusingly relates how Macdonald would use deceptively innocuous small talk to trap him into philosophical debates, such as whether there should be legalized prostitution, and use his own words against him.
Quinn delivers his material in such a breathless, fast-paced style that you wish he would slow down a bit so you could better absorb the jokes. He’s the rare comedian who doesn’t quite let his material breathe enough. But with material this good, it doesn’t matter. If you miss one joke, you’ll catch the next one arriving just a few seconds later.
