O.C. COMEDY REVIEW : Mommies: Queens of the Cul-de-Sac Clique

So, what’s so funny about a couple of housewives from Petaluma?

Plenty, it appears, judging from the astonishingly fast rise of the Mommies--real-life neighbors Marilyn Kentz and Caryl Kristensen--who have landed their own NBC sitcom just three years after first nailing their club act together.

Comics who headline clubs usually are introduced by way of their TV credits. While most list various cable comedy shows and the odd “Tonight” show appearance, the Mommies’ credits, announced as they took the stage at the Improv on Wednesday, included “The Joan Rivers Show,” “Regis and Kathie Lee” and “Oprah.”

The Mommies, clearly, are a phenomenon, zooming past the faceless masses of comics fighting over dwindling club dates by appealing to a relatively untapped market: white suburban moms. Kentz and Kristensen seem to have come along with the right shtick at the right time.

“Did you come here tonight in a minivan? Then this show is for you,” Fullerton native Kristensen told the crowd at the beginning of Wednesday’s sold-out show. Kentz later said the duo has shown “It’s OK to laugh at your own kids and your own fat.”

There’s little remarkable about the pair’s material, alas, save for the comedy-club setting. Much of it is rooted firmly in Erma Bombeck territory, perhaps a little more risque at times but mostly generic nonetheless: laundry, tampons, labor, cooking, diets, soap operas, the demands of raising kids, the demands of sex-starved husbands.

In the Mommies’ somewhat retrograde universe, sex is something women use to get their man to fix that busted shelf in the garage.

“I like sex,” Kristensen allowed. “It’s just that I always thought it was for thin people who had time.” When Kentz shared her most intimate fantasy, it was set in a Target store: “I’m with the children and they’re not bugging me.”

At the sold-out Improv, the largely female crowd loved it all. These “women of the cul-de-sac,” as Kentz has dubbed them, clearly identified with the less-than-reverent take on motherhood. For a reviewer who is both male and childless, the pleasures were less apparent.

The pair alternated short monologues, interspersed with joint routines and musical parodies (“Migraine,” sung to the tune of “My Girl,” for example). Much of the set has an unpolished, let’s-put-on-a-show feel that actually serves as one of the Mommies’ greatest strengths. Their naturalness and genuine good humor is clearly the biggest reason they connect so well with their audience--they really are just a couple of housewives (their term) from Petaluma, after all.

Sometimes the comics went after more than laughs of mere recognition, generally with some success. There was a bit that poked fun at the booming lingerie business, in which Kentz deflated the male fantasy with a bit of well-delivered reality. “This is a woman’s body,” she said, gesturing to her own. “Get used to it. This is Victoria’s little secret.”

And here’s Kristensen on feminine hygiene advertising on TV: “Do you douche in a meadow--with your mother, no less?”

The pair offered some funny change-of-pace material late in the set, venturing off the housewife turf. Kristensen came out at one point dressed as a life-size Barbie, offering a series of laments over her life as a toy.

“Do you know what it’s like to have your head snapped off, and then wake up in the dog’s mouth?” she asked. “It was 1970 before I could bend at the waist. I had a car for 10 years before I could sit in it.”

But it’s the housewife stuff that got the Mommies where they are, and that is destined to be the cornerstone of their NBC sitcom, slated to air Saturday nights beginning this fall. In the comedy marketplace, they are clearly filling a need.

The Mommies return to Orange County June 22-24, when they play the Brea Improv.