Review: Political and Social Satirist Katie Goodman Definitely Doesn't 'F*ck It Up' In Her Hilarious Show at Stage 72

If Lorelai Gilmore, with her lightning fast speech, did political satire while rapping and playing both the piano and acoustic guitar, it would look something like Katie Goodman's hybrid comedy and cabaret act. Her latest show, I Didn't F*ck It Up, ran at Stage 72 (The Triad) on June 17, her cabaret home in the city. The liberal Jewish daughter of Pulitzer-winning Boston Globe journalist Ellen Goodman is a longtime Park Slope mom who co-writes songs with husband Soren Kisel and leads the all-woman troupe, Broad Comedy. The whip-smart, wisecracking brunette with blue eyes and more than a passing resemblance to Gilmore Girls and Parenthood star, Lauren Graham, is a like a female Andy Borowitz-or John Fuselgang, who had a career in cabaret long before he became famous for his lacerating comic critiques of conservative politics.

Goodman's new show combines old favorites like "Multitasking" and "Sorry Babe, But You're a Feminist" (a song with over 500,000 views on YouTube written as a response to Demi Moore, Katy Perry, and other female stars who eschew that label) with newer material about aging and parenthood, like "Halfway Closer to Dead" (written on the eve of Goodman's 48th birthday) and "Give Me a Man Over 40."

It's R-rated stuff (which strays occasionally into NC-17 terrain). As Goodman joked in an interview about a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in Montana, this is not a show you bring the conservative in-laws or kids. Then again, there aren't a lot of Tea Partiers and Trump supporters in the overlapping worlds of cabaret and Broadway. With rare exceptions (Dennis Miller comes to mind) conservatives don't really do funny, and he was funnier before his "conversion."

The title song of the show is a folk ballad whose humor, like many of Goodman's songs, derives in part from the disjunction between form and content. There's something disarming about the strategic deployment of the F-word amidst the catalogue of all the legitimately "f***** up" things in the world. The various forms of the F-word make the song all the funnier: "unf***" and "unf******" (which now appears in Urban Dictionary and credited to her).

Goodman's evident good nature and extraordinary comedic instincts save "I Didn't F*** It Up" from the sanctimony of your typical social justice warrior (SJW), as does her self-deprecation and recognition of "privilege"--which has to be the most irritating and overused buzzword in contemporary America among a certain sort of liberal.

Goodman's unique brand of comedy and music is neither preachy nor cloying because she is unselfconsciously a Park Slope mom (and an Ivy League graduate with a degree in philosophy) who really does want to make the world a more just, humane place, while knowing full well that things don't seem to be moving in the right direction. She harbors no illusions that even the best intentioned of people among her cohort can achieve more than partial progress.

Still, unless one is going to take the view of the Tea Party, viciously parodied in the rap, "I Ain't Funding This Sh*T," one has to keep trying to "unf*ckitup." To this end, her Broad Comedy launched "Abortion Road Trip" as part of a campaign by NARAL (National Abortion Rights Action League) to underscore the devastating effects of Republican legislation that amounts to a de facto ban on abortion, because women in some states simply cannot travel 500 or more miles to the nearest termination clinic.

Healthy cynicism and pragmatism make a song like "Another Goddamn Fundraiser" work. The bedtime story about Mama Bear telling Baby Bear that along with warmer and longer days, spring means "another goddamn f****** fundraiser" left the audience gasping for air between laughs. Adopting the soothing tone of a preschool teacher, Goodman paints a picture of fundraising season all too familiar to some of us. She pulls off the hip-hop material (no small feat for a white woman pushing 50) for the same reason: she never takes herself too seriously and the songs in an improbable genre are tongue-in-cheek.

Obviously, the fundraising set is a select group, but the mom and aging material has appeal beyond the top 1-2% of American earners: "I can shampoo my hair and shave my legs/Though once I almost shaved my head (true story)/So what if every now and then I end up in Scooby Doo underwear?" She doesn't shy away from female sexuality, either, joking about masturbating while paying bills and painting her toes, or nearing org*sm when she remembers the shin guards for her son's soccer game (which required some explanation!). "Things I Can't Fuckin' Remember" speaks to the senior moments middle-aged people regardless of class begin to experience at 50. "Give Me A Man Over 40" lauds the men who "drink responsibly at expensive pubs" and have careers, rather than jobs, while "Halfway Closer To Dead" takes some consolation in the wisdom that comes with maturity (as well as in oral sex on her original, meaning not replaced, knees).

The one foray into classical singing--"La Donna e Mobile" from Verdi's Rigoletto--is a surprise in a show featuring acerbic folk and comedic rap. Goodman won't be singing at the Met any time soon, but she is a more than competent opera singer. And singing so well and satirically at that register with the breath control she displays illustrates the scope of her talent. The lyrics [spoken without the Italian accent] are among the funniest in the show: "How about you let gays get married and lighten up on abortion/ And in return we won't teach our kids--No f**k that we'll still teach evolution . . . We believe in climate change/You think science is dumb/Let's find some middle ground/That's not already under the ocean . . . I know it's subjective/But don't you see that you are wrong/Yes my liberal heart bleeds/But that's because I have one."

"You're Probably Gay," a takedown of anti-gay politicians and homophobes that, with recourse to the 1996 study which appeared in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, is priceless (and much better live than in the YouTube clip). The only number all night that fell flat was "Nazis Get All the P***y," which the audience didn't know what to make of, to judge by those I saw with perplexed faces at neighboring tables. But "I Didn't F*ck It Up" is 70 minutes of nonstop laughter and music which in its small way does solidify one's desire to help "unf***itup."

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