The Cody Rivers Show: Tangle

Rendezvous Jewel Box Theater
by Lindy West

You know when you spend most of your life eating chocolate chips and watching ABC Family Channel original movies and crying (come on, sure you do), and then you drag yourself outside for one little night of theater and it turns out to be something so purely creative and wondrous that it's like getting a hug straight from the Baby Jesus? The Cody Rivers Show is like that, like a reassuring blast of weird, delightful brilliance. Like maybe humans aren't useless after all.

Saturday night's show coincided, lamentably, with "Santarchy," a heee-larious annual guerrilla march of sexy elves and Kringle-clad drunks (some in heee-larious afro wigs!), who packed the Rendezvous with their fuzzy red bodies and their deafening ho-ho-hos. Still, Cody Rivers cocreators Mike Mathieu and Andrew Connor forged ahead, the permeating hokey-jokey din illuminating, by contrast, the high-concept intricacy of this thing they've made.

This thing isn't sketch comedy exactly, but it's not standard theater, and it isn't funny so much as mesmerizing: a bizarre, impressively choreographed, breakneck montage of song, dance, puppetry, soliloquy, and oddly dramatic vignettes. Some lines are straight-ahead jokes: "No more 'that's gonna leave a mark,' no more 'tastes like chicken'... no more 'okay, I'll shut up now.'" Some speak volumes in a single sentence: "I thought it was funny at first, but I didn't know you could shovel so fast." And my favorite bit of dialogue: "Throw this bag of powder in my face." "What if it's poison?" "Exactly." Exactly! Cody Rivers is clever, it's excellent, and praise the Baby Jesus (hugs!) it's new.

Throw this bag of comedy in your face and be happy, before another MadTV marathon comes along and restores your faith in mediocrity.