STAGE REVIEW : Geoff Hoyle Is Nobody’s--and Everybody’s--Fool

“The fool is ironic rather than comic,” Geoff Hoyle told an interviewer shortly before the Sunday opening of his “The Fool Show” at the La Jolla Playhouse’s Warren Theatre. “The fool’s nonsense comes from sense.”

These are key thoughts, precisely articulated in the world according to Hoyle--a stage universe with a single black screen, a few props, masks and a coat rack. But how simple, really , is keeping things this simple? Watch Hoyle, a master of the (seeming) effortlessness of effort (just like his buddy and co-clown/fool Bill Irwin).

The first half of “The Fool Show” is a one-man concert that starts--at its own risk--with a shadowy and unprepossessing “Primal Folk Fool” show that does little to herald what’s to come. But then things lighten up. Hoyle, who begins sluggishly with bits of lecture-demonstration on the history of fools and fooling, then quickens the pace to chat with his audience in fluent snatches of two or three languages as he riffles jauntily through examples of fools past.

More or less in order come the medieval Feast of Fools (wherein the audience is enjoined to play ass and bray), then an engrossing one-sided dialogue between a coxcombed court jester and his bauble, followed by the classic commedia antics of Arlecchino and Pantalone, including the fastidious “ Arlecchino Mangia la Mosca (Harlequin eats the Fly),” made famous by clown/fools through the ages--most recently Dario Fo.

Hoyle caps the first half with a thoroughly modern routine he calls “Two Waiters,” featuring himself as a supercilious waiter running into himself as a surly one, as they stumble in and out of the “kitchen” behind the trusty black screen. It’s reminiscent of nothing so much as that Marcel Marceau standard “David and Goliath.”

But this is only groundwork. The real goods come after the intermission, when Hoyle goes in for longer stretches of more serious stuff. He kicks things off with “The Fundraiser,” keeping us amused by the ineptitude of a very slow, very stiff, very unamusing British dinner speaker who can’t get the words out. Subtitle that one “How to hang on to an audience through the comedy of terminal boredom.”

The real pieces de resistance , however, are the final two acts. Far more than mere sketches, they are apotheoses of the arts of foolishness. One is a carefully developed character that goes back a few years to Hoyle’s time with San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus; the other is a supreme bit of visual and choreographic comedy. Both involve extra limbs--the former a big red nose, the latter a third leg.

For “Mr. Sniff,” Hoyle outwardly puts on a scarlet Jimmy Durante schnoz. But inwardly he becomes a man governed by his olfactory sense. Like his friends in the animal kingdom, he sniffs things before getting too friendly. At Sunday’s opening, it was his protuberance’s decision that one side of the audience had a distinctly putrid odor. Not to be trusted. But Mr. Sniff does a lot more than that, including becoming to a violin what Victor Borge is to a piano.

And then there is the chair that Mr. Sniff tries to move. It won’t let go of his hand. Simple stuff you say? The effort is something akin to getting rid of a piece of double-superstick tape with four legs and a back. Watch the routine turn into a hilarious montage of complex emotions and gestures, not a wasted one in the lot. Nowhere is Hoyle’s stature as a superclown more fully or aptly demonstrated.

Unless it’s in the next event.

Sparely called “Spare,” the name has a double meaning: spare as in extra and spare as in lean (the greatest artistry is that which employs the least amount of superfluous movement). Hoyle doesn’t speak at all in this one. He doesn’t have to. He walks on stage with three legs and that’s almost all he needs to do. Except of course that he’s kept busy maneuvering that additional limb. How he does it, and what he does with it, are objects of unabashed wonder. Despite the letdown of a shadowy coda that reconnects the end to the “Primal Folk Fool” beginning (both unnecessary), “Spare” left Hoyle’s Sunday audience on its feet, whooping and whistling in uncharacteristic La Jollan behavior.

Ultimately, it is a reaction to the work of an uncommon artist in peak form. But it is also the result of our instinctive recognition of a rare achievement: one man’s long and arduous pursuit and mastery of a largely unsung, iconoclastic art.

Our homogenized, electronicized, mass-marketed world would have us believe that the fool’s life is an anachronism. An insurrection. A third leg. But we know better. We don’t just admire it. We celebrate its presence among mortals.

At the Warren Theatre on Gilman Drive on the UC San Diego campus, Tuesdays through Sundays, 8 p.m.; matinees Saturdays and Sundays, 2 p.m., until Sept. 18. Tickets: $15-$24; (619) 534-3960).