No Cheap Shots, Just ‘Sense’

With the public’s attention freshly turned to talk of White House interns, taped phone calls and rumors of unseemly dress stains, political humor has lately become the realm of salacious one-liners. But to see just how deeply funny, affirming and even moving humor born of politics can be, one need only check out comedian Jimmy Tingle’s one-man show at the Coast Playhouse, “Uncommon Sense.”

In an artfully staged 90-minute performance that begins as autobiography and blossoms into a kind of bar-stool doctoral thesis, the sharp, talented comic works clear, triumphant laughs out of such messy, downbeat topics as political hypocrisy, racial intolerance and corporate greed.

Raised in Boston as a self-described “defensive Catholic,” Tingle exhibits a winning, low-key manner onstage, occasionally declaiming in the high-flown cadence of a Damon Runyon character. Though Tingle may well be an angry voter, he does not posture himself as an angry comic, and despite the serious, sometimes tragic subtext of the material, his affable, energetic presence keeps “Uncommon Sense” remarkably warm and inviting.

Less thoughtful voices might take comedic refuge in cynicism, but Tingle aims higher, emerging by show’s end as a pessimistic idealist. That’s not to say there’s no bite in Tingle’s attack. He postulates an alternative campaign financing system in which politicians are plastered with the logos of their sponsors--a la race car drivers--and then paraded at a fashion show (“Ooh, Newt Gingrich is stunning in that blazer from Philip Morris.”). He calls for more realistic warning labels on beer bottles--”Warning: use of this product may result in pregnancy”--and cogently sums up the power of compassion compared to that of politics: “Let’s face it, Betty Ford has helped a lot more people than Jerry Ford did.”

In mixing a history of personal awakenings with his darkly hopeful political worldview, Tingle has created a paean to the plight of ordinary, reasonable individuals stuck in an unreasonable world. Acknowledging the malevolent whims of all powers that be, the performer refuses to surrender the idea that a better, more peaceful world might not be more than just a bit of common sense away.

The evening ends with a bravura piece that mixes silliness and substance in imagining all the world’s ills in a great horse race and a tremendously affecting coda, in which Tingle describes his old neighborhood reunited for a night at his father’s funeral, earns every bit of its powerful sentiment. Tingle warns at the top of the show that he doesn’t have “clever jokes” to offer his audience, but the night of laughter he is presenting with “Uncommon Sense” is a thoroughly invigorating and uplifting experience.

BE THERE

“Jimmy Tingle’s Uncommon Sense,” through March 22 at the Coast Playhouse, 8325 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays at 7 p.m. Tickets: $20-$22. (213) 660-TKTS.