Oedipus Yeccccchhh
Beau Is Afraid honors "the usual gang of idiots" of MAD Magazine
The first half hour Beau Is Afraid is exquisitely dank and cacophonous, bursting with cartoon vivacity, a dissonant city symphony of menace and mayhem that’s the best emulation of the classic “usual gang of idiots” pack-the-frame style of MAD magazine since David Zucker’s Naked Gun, but with more jeopardy than jokes, literal eye-gouging rather than the legendary comic’s metaphorical “eyeball kicks.” Talk about “Oedipus Yecccchhh!,” to use MAD-made parlance.
Beau’s walk-up is both dream and nightmare of a 1980s-style slumlord bargain, a woebegone rundown hovel of a place, but with so much space, such high ceilings, swaddled in catastrophic hues, over a sex shop neon-signed as Ejectus Erectus. There are spiders. And lots of screaming and gunfire in this part of town! Should I mention the brown recluse spiders? And the literally dick-swinging side-stabber?
Below, the streets teem with shouty carnage; upstairs, by night and day, a neighbor leaves nonsensical threatening notes; Beau’s keys disappear and his bathtub overflows. Beau Wasserman: there is so much water in this man’s life, tubs filling and overfilling again and again; a life soaked, detonated, denied, fathomless and amniotic. Wasserman. Water man. Still a water boy carrying for his mother.
Full review here.