COMEDY REVIEW : For Ventriloquist Dan Horn, Less Is More

The first time Dan Horn played the Laff Stop last August, he worked as a middle act, which made it all the more noteworthy that his performance drew a standing ovation. Standing ovations are rare in comedy and almost unheard of for middle acts.

Horn opened a five-night stand at the Newport Beach club Wednesday, but this time he was a headliner. And while he elicited a strong response, there was no standing ovation.

The two points are not unrelated. Horn is an enormously gifted ventriloquist-puppeteer, but his act should obey the less-is-more rule. In that 25-minute middle-act slot, he was consistently entertaining, at times even astounding, and left you wanting more.

But his 50-minute set Wednesday was only intermittently impressive, partly because some routines seemed overlong, leaving you with the feeling you had seen more than enough.

These are glitches that are easy enough to fix. The most immediate solution would be for him to trim his headlining performances to a tighter 40 minutes.

He also might consider introducing another character into the act that represents a sharply contrasting point of view from those we saw Wednesday, especially his primary puppet, Orson.

This would still necessitate tightening other parts of his act (a plus), but would also make the show richer and more diverting (a bigger plus).

Of course, these suggestions aren’t meant to insult Orson. For one thing, you wouldn’t want to be in Orson’s doghouse. In addition to his penchant for lechery and innuendo, the 91-year-old former vaudeville singer is an irascible coot, uninhibited and prone to acerbic comments.

That is, he helps Horn set up the classic adversarial relationship between ventriloquist and dummy: An easygoing, innocent straight man, continually nonplussed and embarrassed by the words and actions of his irrepressible, often-naughty right-hand man.

At the same time, Horn is certainly pulling his weight in making the duo so successful. There’s dazzling talent at work here.

Orson is a rod puppet (think of Madame, the late Wayland Flowers’ sidekick), which means Horn is not only controlling Orson’s mouth and body movements with his right hand, but the old guy’s arm movements with rods manipulated by his left hand. Moreover, unlike Flowers and most others working with rod puppets, Horn is a ventriloquist. And a first-rate one.

Actually, you have to force yourself to notice the dazzling talent because Horn is so good--the execution so accomplished and seamless--that you needn’t be drunk or dim to quickly suspend disbelief and see Orson as a living, breathing (if slightly undersize) old codger. Orson’s great.

It’s just that Wednesday, there was too much of a great thing. We saw Orson awakened in his little suitcase. We saw him flirt insistently with a woman in the front row. We saw him sing a song. (One measure of Horn’s ventriloquism skill was the varying volume of Orson’s singing voice as he moved to and from the microphone.)

We saw Orson gesture and wave. We saw him stare incredulously at Horn. We saw him do several other things, including react to a surprise reunion with his former singing partner, a frumpy old gal named Polly Ester. (After Horn removed Orson’s rods to prepare for Polly’s arrival, there was a nifty brief bit in which Orson reacted to his arms’ sudden loss of mobility.)

Apart from a little dialogue and a song, however, the reunion didn’t go anywhere much. Both Polly and Orson did go into a trunk, and there was every reason to believe that it was the last we would see of them. It should have been. But after announcing that he wanted to try a magic trick, Horn pulled Orson back out for another lengthy routine that seemed grafted on. It might have seemed less so with a different character.

Indeed, aside from the brief, almost throwaway appearance by Polly, the only other character who appeared Wednesday was Cassandra, who’s younger than Orson, but similarly sassy and oversexed. Also like Orson--and Polly, for that matter--Cassandra did a little singing.

There was some nice, frenetic visual business that developed out of Cassandra’s struggle against Horn’s efforts to shove her back in the suitcase. At one point, she lost her wig and there was an allusion to Bull, the bald bailiff on “Night Court,” whom she closely resembled then.

But by then, the set was nearing the 50-minute mark, and felt longer. At the moment, Horn is an extraordinary middle-act in a headliner’s time slot. Given his considerable talent, though, it shouldn’t take much adjusting and fine tuning to wind up extraordinary--period.

Dan Horn continues through Sunday at the Laff Stop, 2122 S.E. Bristol, Newport Beach. Show times: 8, 10 and 11:45 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 8:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: $6 to $9. Information: (714) 852-8762.