“Between phones, AirPods, and self-checkout, small talk is down 87 per cent,” the comedian Colin Quinn jokes, in his new show, “Small Talk,” which seeks to celebrate the much-maligned form.
Though theoretically pleasant, small talk—opening gambits, friendly chitchat, weather observations—tends to be the Rodney Dangerfield of conversation: it gets no respect. But the comedian Colin Quinn, raspy-voiced, Brooklyn-accented, and rat-a-tat loquacious, revels in it, including in his new solo theatre show, “Small Talk,” at the Lucille Lortel.
In the show, Quinn makes wry observations from an enthusiast’s perspective and offers tips, of a sort ; philosophizes ; and encourages widespread education. Before preschool, teach your kid, “ ‘Wait—before you go in there. It’s not your family in there. This is the big leagues. This is society. . . . Walk in with a little something.
Quinn, who has written and performed eight solo shows, on and off Broadway, grew up as the son of teachers, in Park Slope, loving the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin: “My brother and I had these obscure Pryor bootlegs, with Pryor doing these characters at little clubs—it was so powerful. I’d never heard anything like it.” He started doing standup in 1984, after he quit drinking. He’d been afraid of bombing onstage.
Quinn, a comic’s comic, became famous to Gen X-ers in the eighties, as the announcer-sidekick on “Remote Control,” MTV’s anarchic-comedic game show , and to mainstream audiences on “Saturday Night Live” in the nineties; he applied his gravelly straight-talking brio to political analysis on “Weekend Update” and his Comedy Central roundtable, “Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn,” and to hyperdrive smack talk on Howard Stern’s shows and the comedy-roast circuit.
“Small Talk,” directed by James Fauvell, has evolved as a kind of dialogue itself. “Sometimes I’ll be in my own head,” Quinn said. “I’ve been slandered many times as being a person that’s having a conversation with myself onstage.” “You want to let people in.” He went on, “The good thing about laughter is you get to go, ‘Oh, I’m not crazy.’ ” He doesn’t mind not getting laughs for every joke, but “I don’t want to live in a delusion.
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