The Battle of the Sexes Is Waged With One-Liners

Men think; women feel.

Give that a knee-jerk hiss, sister, and you’ve just proved it’s true.

Just kidding. The gender jokes, which don’t get much deeper or more caustic than that, are delivered with the balm of equality in Robert Dubac’s naughty-nice comedy for adults, “The Male Intellect: an oxymoron?,” in which men come in for their own goodly share of tongue-in-cheek abuse.

In this long-running, nationally touring solo show, making a stop at the Wilshire Theatre, Dubac, with dubious help from his five chauvinistic alter egos, struggles to figure out what women really want from men. He’s got a personal stake in it: His fiancee has taken what might be a permanent hiatus from their relationship and he’s desperate to patch it up. She was going to call him in two weeks; he’s got about 90 minutes before time’s up.

And all he’d said to her--no, really--was that he needed more space ... from her cat.

Perplexed and a tad defensive, Dubac doesn’t get much help from a pile of self-help books; he can barely lift “The Male Ego.”

Next stop on his quest is his own brain. The feminine half (voiced by Dubac’s real-life wife, Lauren Sinclair) is represented on one side of the stage by a blank chalkboard, awaiting any words of wisdom he may stumble across; on the other side, the masculine hemisphere is a “Man Show” mess of beer bottles, dirty laundry, a couch and TV, food wrappers and a pull-down poster photo of a sexy former girlfriend.

From here on, the show is a series of one-liners--”men and women have the same vocabulary but different dictionaries”--and connected anecdotes told by Dubac as himself and his stereotypical alter egos: the Colonel, who’s a jerk and proud of it; oozing French charmer Jean-Michel; 123-year-old Mr. Linger, kept alive by his wait for the perfect woman, an elusive mermaid; the Jack Nicholson-channeling self-proclaimed “pig,” Fast Eddie; and tough but romantic Brooklynite Ronnie Cabrezzi, who has trouble decoding his girlfriend’s use of a certain expletive as noun, verb and adjective.

Despite their macho cluelessness, each does lead Dubac toward just barely understanding what women might actually want in a relationship, as he writes the answers on the chalkboard. That the flip side of said chalkboard is covered with such hard-to-erase and equally stereotypical male characteristics as fear of commitment, the Three Stooges and rude noises gives Dubac more fix-it work to do.

Dubac never ventures beyond the shallow into new or original depths with his narrowly focused material, but his assured theatrical chops and air of genuine anguish get him past a few ho-hum spots and less than witty crudities to elicit big laughs from both sexes, together and in waves of treble and bass.

There’s a sneaky second payoff, too, after the hilarious sight-gag highlight that ostensibly ends the show. It comes when it all seems to be over, so don’t leave too soon. For that matter, early female arrivals especially should listen to the joke slyly tucked into the pre-show music, sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

“The Male Intellect: an oxymoron?,” Wilshire Theatre, 8440 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. through Oct. 6. $35-$45. (213) 365-3500. Running time: 90 minutes.