It’s easy to think that we live in a coarsened age, and that juvenile humor and bad taste are everywhere.
But John Valby takes bad taste and politically incorrect, sex-obsessed parody to whole new places. There’s something charmingly retro about his oom-pah barroom piano playing and X-rated limerick singing.
Valby’s act is a little like Milton Berle meets the crew from “A Clockwork Orange.” Or like sociopathic vaudeville. Or maybe the Insane Clown Posse as rendered by Al Jolson. Or a criminally obscene Garrison Keillor. Mad Magazine meets Hustler.
Whatever it is, it fries one’s circuits and sensibilities, with songs making fun of Glen Campbell’s struggle with Alzheimer’s, lurid racist and misogynist fantasias about masturbation and oral sex, TV anthems and campfire songs transformed into riffs on orifices, fluids and appendages. It’s not for the prudish.
If you have the capacity to be offended, you will be. Expect plenty of holiday cheer and gross eggnog jokes at Valby’s XXX-mas Special. If you’re really into porn, musical spoofs and the First Amendment, you’ll salute “Dr. Dirty.”
John Valby plays at Toad’s Place, 300 York St., New Haven, Friday, Dec. 23, at 10 p.m. $20. toadsplace.com, 203-624-8623.
