Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Now That's Audience Participation!

On the Frank Zappa album Lather, there's a live version of "Honey, Don't You Wanna Man Like Me" in which Frank deals quickly, brutally, and humorously with a heckler - "Fuck you, too, buddy. Fuck you very much" - without he or the band missing a beat.

Well, hard as this may be to believe, Barbara Streisand is no Frank Zappa, either musically or satirically. During a show in New York last night, a poorly conceived comedy bit broke out in which Babs sparred verbally with an impersonator playing Dubya (in even dimmer fashion than in real life). Not all were amused:

Though most of the crowd offered polite applause during the slightly humorous routine, it got a bit too long, especially for a few in the audience who just wanted to hear Streisand sing like she had been doing for the past hour.

'Come on, be polite!' the well-known liberal implored during the sketch as she and 'Bush' exchanged zingers. But one heckler wouldn't let up. And finally, Streisand let him have it.

'Shut the [fuck] up!' Streisand bellowed, drawing wild applause. 'Shut up if you can't take a joke!'

While nobody loves some dumb Dubya shtick more than I do, I would be kind of pissed if I paid way too much money to see Babs croon (imagine an alternate universe version of me - I have to in order to get through even the idea of it) and got a bad SNL sketch during the proceedings.

Still, it's good thing Babs no longer has the Triangle of Zinthar, or the heckler would have ended up a small puddle of goo on the Madison Square Garden floor!

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