CASINO EVIL
Take the wonderful “Pencil”: an office worker confronts a colleague who has innocently asked to borrow his pencil. As this guy sees it, it’s clearly a request to touch his penis–his friend must be gay. This sudden bout of homosexual panic could easily have triggered the usual knee-jerk macho reactions. Instead the lonely bachelor-inquisitor (played by Scott Adsit with a precise abandon) slowly launches a monologue: it turns out he longs for the risks and rewards he imagines come with being gay (a parade of his own, all those beautiful girls flocking around equally beautiful–and presumably unthreatening–gay men). Whenever this confession gets intense, a third clerk ambles in just in time to overhear–naturally, out of context–some compromising revelation. (At the end he pops a surprise of his own.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The vintage Second City silliness includes a crackbrained male hymn to the pleasures of showers (complete with towel-snapping choreography and a klutzy allusion to Busby Berkeley), a rather mean-spirited send-up of office temps, and a crude opening (and closing) tribute to devolution: “Somebody fucked a monkey and we’re all here,” so “Scratch that primal itch!” Other jokes involve Jesus’ answering machine, a chump who puts more than a dog out of its misery, a son whose ownership of a pair of panties means both less and more than it seems, and a slow-motion brawl on a crowded train.
