Comedy show or treatment programme? Mary Beth Barone’s Drag His Ass is a bit of both. The problem it’s treating is “fuckboys”, a term Barone has much fun defining here, with PowerPoint’s assistance. But if you’ve ever been seduced then cruelly cast aside, you’ll know the type. Although she is in a blissful relationship now, Barone was once a habitual fuckboy fall-girl. Drag His Ass, also a Comedy Central web series, was created to heal herself, and – in the on stage interview that closes the show – administer therapy to a different perpetrator at each performance.
That dialogue, with a remarkable young man called Rich, is the runaway highlight of tonight’s performance. Talk about a comedy gift that keeps on giving! To escalating disbelief, Rich is revealed – under Barone’s artful questioning – as quite the promiscuity bureaucrat, with Excel spreadsheets documenting his sexual conquests, and a “rejection form” prepared for those (many) occasions when it’s time to move on. In due course, Barone obliges this part sociopath, part very good sport, to recite a pledge abjuring his fuckboy ways. A strength of the show is the depth of feeling underpinning the sex comedy: Barone acknowledges this stuff can hurt, and we should be kinder to one another.
There’s less sense of that earlier, when she opens with standup about her own love life: all very droll, but more arch than emotionally open. There follows a public information presentation about fuckboys, and how they’re mutating; and a not-so-deep dive into the question: “Why is everyone so horny?” The most incongruous element of Drag His Ass then follows, as three visiting standups perform short sets.
The idea is that these guest stars address their own hook-up and dating experiences. But that barely happens here, as Esther Manito discusses the dull domesticity of married life, and Toussaint Douglas talks about his middle-class girlfriend. (Leo Reich is the only one of the trio remotely on point.) No one is complaining, of course: three bonus standup sets are not to be sniffed at. But they dilute the focus of Barone’s silly but sneakily serious take on too-casual casual sex and its collateral damage.
• At Soho theatre, London, until 18 June. Barone’s Silly Little Girl is at Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh, from 3-28 August.
