Wise Guys

Full Frontal Comedy sounds like it’s going to be filthy.

Instead, it’s sweet-natured, sometimes ribald, occasionally angry — but in a sensible, evenhanded way. The company’s shows, which generally pair improv with scripted sketches, might tickle the taboo, and the performers are unafraid to work blue, but they never do so cynically or without a comic point or in the interest of cheap laughs.

Founder Tina Morrison is, however, a little wicked. She’s about 80 percent smile, seems fueled entirely by pluck, and is to Midwestern niceness what Tom Waits is to the hobo lifestyle — if the subject deserved a magazine, she could be its Rachael Ray. But then, she might play Ray herself, hosting “30 Minute Abortions,” Full Frontal’s response to South Dakota’s abortion ban.

Though dick jokes don’t offend these days, a political perspective often does. As Full Frontal prepares its Best of 2006 show at the classy digs of Quality Hill Playhouse, I asked Morrison about the risks of doing a bit like “Seasons of Bush,” a Rent parody lashing the president.

“We had a woman once get very angry that we were making fun of Bush,” Morrison told me. “And you know what? Too bad! If she had wanted to stick around after the show and debate with me the merits of that jackass, I would have welcomed it.”

Morrison’s one rule: “We can make fun of any politicians, political parties, religion or anything that could be debated and discussed.” She added, “I do not like to make fun of races, sexuality — unless we’re making a point about how stupid homophobic people are — or special needs.”

The best-of show will highlight Full Frontal’s favorite sketches of 2006 as well as the crowd-pleasing improv games that are often the best part of the troupe’s shows. And because Morrison’s group doesn’t depend on improv games — throwing them at audiences for more than an hour the way that other outfits do — Full Frontal’s feel fresher.

A steady diet of those rapid-fire improv games can be as bad as a diet of anything else fatty and insubstantial — when richer fare is offered, audiences are often unable to digest it, let alone savor it. A case in point is Comedy City’s exemplary 2 Much Duck.

Recently, I heard that, after months of inspired shows, Duck was still losing audience members at intermission. Some audiences seem unable (or unwilling) to step up to Duck, a smarter show than the Comedy City norm. Duck demands not that audience members shout hackneyed shit like “Harry Potter!” or “Paris Hilton!” but rather full-on audience engagement, even adaptation. It asks for grown-up suggestions for its grown-up comedy.

Every show celebrates evolutionary theory. At the opening, an audience member shouts a single word (awhile back, it was cat). The Ducks immediately spin monologues from it before moving on to scenes in which the performers act out situations indebted to the monologues the same way that starlings are indebted to stegosauruses. Most ideas work, but those that don’t are — like vestigial tails — quietly chucked as Duck moves on to something new, something unprecedented, something you never would have guessed but makes perfect sense. The scenes nurse an idea’s progress from single-celled blob to full-bodied, adaptive life.

The trick is trust within the group. Once a scene ends, someone rushes onstage and starts doing something, anything. Usually, a second Duck follows, reacting to the first, and then they’re off, the space between them alive with possibility. One choice bit last month involved a scoutmaster husband (Josh Steinmetz) awarding absurd merit badges to family members. Linda Williams stepped in, complaining, “I’ve had it with this badge system,” and suddenly this light comic notion had history, weight and pain. The merit badge idea had earlier been introduced by Pete Calderone, who radiates cool humor but is also willing not to be funny to set others up. He tossed it into the air like that ape tosses that bone in 2001; Steinmetz caught it and applied it to a marriage, then Williams pushed it forward, applying it to real life. A one-joke scene had grown into an examination of the troubles between real people, culminating in Williams, with a sad snuffle, asking her distant man just what, if any, badge he has set aside for her.

“The ‘Talks Big But Suffers Low Self-Esteem and Keeps Coming Back For More’ one,” Steinmetz said.

They froze, and then others — the funny Michael Montague and Rob Grabowski — were up, urging what had just passed into something new, engineering each scene toward one shared impulse: making us laugh.

The bad news is that, starting in February, Duck’s wings are getting clipped. Instead of two shows a month, Duck (and the sometimes-great sketch troupe Monkeys With Hand Grenades) will be reduced to one as Comedy City adds stand-up and new sketch comedy — the noisy, nasty WTF Show. I want to bitch about this, but that’d be contrary to the very Duck values that I so enjoy: natural selection, yo.