The Professor of Comedy, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio, and Scary Baby: The Pat & Tamara Show, at Second City, Donny’s Skybox Studio. There’s a lot of stupid comedy–every gagster-rapper who gets five minutes on Letterman seems to inspire a dozen more to think, I can do better than that! But David Spark and Dion Stanley have put dumb humor at the service of smart comedy in The Professor of Comedy, a mock lecture-demonstration on how to be funny. Spark is assisted by slides of professional-looking diagrams, flow charts, and so on and by Stanley, who provides live-action examples of the topics: whether “fuck” is funnier than “shit,” how to do ethnic humor without offending, the creeping menace of “prop comedians,” why a question isn’t funny as a punch line, why improv comedy is always unfunny.
