Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop
With a shrug, a shuffle, and a twitch of his hips, Danny Hoch takes his place in the hip-hop diaspora, a culture that originated in American cities but has become a lucrative international business selling toughness and ghetto culture as earnestly as Disney sells family values. Hoch–who teaches performance in jails, universities, and high schools–aims his art at the young people who buy the hip-hop style. But if last Saturday’s audience was any indication, his leftist sincerity and boyish energy attract adults as well. Still, I’m not sure that everyone will be as amused as the kids by his stand-up rhythms and somewhat formulaic characters.
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Jails, Hospitals & Hip-Hop is the second of Hoch’s collages of monologues, rap, and meditation developed in collaboration with Jo Bonney, who made a name directing such solo performers as Eric Bogosian (her husband) and Karen Williams. Bonney’s love for blunt, emotional narratives shapes the stand-up energy of this show into tiny plays within plays, pristine confessions that take the audience somewhere that feels dangerous enough to be true but safe enough for TV. In fact Hoch’s first show, Some People, was made into an HBO special in 1996, earning him a few choice fellowships and the brief, comically abortive opportunity to work with Jerry Seinfeld.
David Kodeski’s brilliant but low-key portrait of an ordinary working-class woman, Another Lousy Day, is unlikely to hold any attraction for the audience member who screamed with laughter and slapped her knee whenever Hoch rocked back and forth in a stationary swagger, pursed his lips, and snorted to punctuate his disdain for white-acting, straitlaced ignorance. Hoch speaks for and to a young audience, though his brashness and chutzpah echo the very man he criticizes, Jerry Seinfeld. Although he has several personas, accents, and attitudes, Hoch joshes the audience into a casual comedy-club relationship–the stuff that now makes for successful sitcom stars. Although his machismo is sometimes sweet and always leftist, it still reeks of a testosterone high, and his adolescent rebellion makes the stories–and hip-hop’s bravado–seem a little shallow, at least in the context of other solo performers.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo Paula Court.
