Barry Crimmins rekindles old political fire at at grass-roots clubBoston Herald Something happened Sunday night at the Comedy Studio, the grass-roots club above the Hong Kong Chinese restaurant in Harvard Square. After the final show of Barry Crimmins' three-night appearance here, a torch was passed. "I'm here to endorse the idea of the Hong Kong,'' said Crimmins, the founding father of Boston's most fabled comedy scene, now returning to comedy performance after a long hiatus. In 1979, Crimmins, a politically minded comedian from upstate New York, started booking Boston's brightest, brashest young wits into the Ding Ho, a seedy Chinese restaurant in Inman Square. The club, run for and by comedians, was an un-pedigreed underdog (it competed against Paul Barclay's well-established Comedy Connection), but broke conventions of the day in paying its performers reasonable fees and maintaining Crimmins' comedy booking standards. He was hell-bent on originality and unforgiving of plagiarism. It was boot camp for the best comics in Boston and some of the most successful standups in the country. The scene there is sometimes better remembered for its partying excesses. (Bobcat Goldthwait called it "Sodom and Gomorrah with a $5 cover'' at the Ding Ho reunion show last fall.) To its vets, it has yet to be rivaled in talent and scope. But in mentioning the Hong Kong and Ding Ho in the same breath, Crimmins effectively passed the baton to Comedy Studio founder and comic Rick Jenkins. A showing from the old guard was there to share the moment. In the audience were Mike Donovan, whom Crimmins has credited with writing a good portion of the best jokes in circulation today; folksinger-funnyman Chance Langton; Fran Solomita, a former Boston comic now completing a documentary feature film about Boston's comedy boom; and Tony V., the host of tonight's show, who came in during the weekend to catch the early Saturday set with his buddy Goldthwait. (The young Goldthwait followed Crimmins here from Skaneateles, N.Y., according to Tony V.) To his old crowd, Crimmins is the patron saint of original, creative comedy in Boston and a brooding ideologue. His wit is as sharp as his sense of social justice, which has been known to eclipse a joke or two. But his hour-plus show, "Chicken Soup for the Vegetarian Soul,'' served as a persuasive example of what intelligent stand-up comedy, politically themed or otherwise, can be. Crimmins is no stranger to the leftist harangue, and the show included a few patches of pure political hectoring (don't get him started on Vietnam). The vast majority of the show, however, was dense with strong points and stronger punch lines. As he paced the stage in his agitated musings, Crimmins covered a huge range of political and social bases, local and otherwise: the Big Dig (where Joe Malone's staff found new jobs); SUVs (an acronym for "suddenly useless vehicles'' thanks to recent soaring oil prices); Elian Gonzalez's Miami family ("the kid would be in better hands if Bobby Knight were his parents''). The worst thing about the Columbine massacre was "the white casket signed like an autograph book,'' Crimmins said. "Can you imagine being sent to eternity wrapped in your high school yearbook? 'Good luck on your finals!' '' Crimmins was adamant about standing on his own political ground, mocking the overuse of the term "politically correct'' (a phrase created, he admitted sardonically, by "people like me''), and laughing off the concept of Hillary Clinton as a rabble-rousing liberal (she's no Eleanor Roosevelt, he said, remarking that the former First Lady "used to write a weekly column called 'Why FDR Blows' ''). It all added up to a hugely promising one-man theater show, a format for which Crimmins' comedy seems well-suited. "I would love to do something like Jackie Mason's show - although we have nothing in common politically,'' said Crimmins, adding that Boston would be a good place to try it out and "will always be my artistic base camp.'' But as far as perpetuating the Ding Ho legacy, it will be up to others to win the war against hollow, commercialized entertainment. "Fran (Solomita) asked me what I was really up to at the Ding Ho,'' said Crimmins at the end of his show. His driving purpose, he admitted, was to establish a place to "say what I meant and do what I wanted to do.'' To make that happen, he added for the benefit of the young Studio regulars in the crowd, "you have to work hard. You can still do hip, underground scenes. You need more Hong Kongs. But you gotta start them.''
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