Comedy show or treatment programme? Mary Beth Barone’s Drag His Ass is a bit of both. The problem it’s treating is “fuckboys”, a term Barone has much fun defining here, with PowerPoint’s assistance. But if you’ve ever been seduced then cruelly cast aside, you’ll know the type. Although she is in a blissful relationship now, Barone was once a habitual fuckboy fall-girl. Drag His Ass, also a Comedy Central web series, was created to heal herself, and – in the on stage interview that closes the show – administer therapy to a different perpetrator at each performance.
That dialogue, with a remarkable young man called Rich, is the runaway highlight of tonight’s performance. Talk about a comedy gift that keeps on giving! To escalating disbelief, Rich is revealed – under Barone’s artful questioning – as quite the promiscuity bureaucrat, with Excel spreadsheets documenting his sexual conquests, and a “rejection form” prepared for those (many) occasions when it’s time to move on. In due course, Barone obliges this part sociopath, part very good sport, to recite a pledge abjuring his fuckboy ways. A strength of the show is the depth of feeling underpinning the sex comedy: Barone acknowledges this stuff can hurt, and we should be kinder to one another.
