The Boston Herald
Monday, January 31, 2000
 
 

Festival of Funny Songwriters at the Somerville Theatre Saturday night.

 Was it folk, or was it funny? At Saturday night's 8th annual Festival of Funny Songwriters at the Somerville Theatre, the answer, incredibly, was both... sometimes. 

Laughs at a folk music show are not, by nature, strictly out of the question, so it was no big surprise to admire a wryly witty lyrical turn from time to time. But the form has its excesses, to be sure. Some of what passed for comedy was just a matter of ``clever'' punning and ``funny'' rhymes as predictable as the next capo-fixed chord on the performer's acoustic guitars.
 
 

Not that the Somerville Theatre audience was much of a challenge. This was no thuggish comedy-club mob but a crowd of mild-mannered liberals who laughed at virtually everything, especially if it had to do with the mortifications of middle-age. 

But much of the show, which included several sidesplitting stand-up bits by emcee Julie Barr, provided ample reason to laugh out loud.
 
 

No matter how long some moments of the four-hour marathon felt, perennial festival favorite Don White made getting all the way through the show worthwhile. Armed with an OK singing voice, great timing and a genuine gift for personal anecdotal comedy, White topped off the show with a huge bang. Between some sweetly amusing songs, White told tales of classic American family life that had the audience screaming with laughter: The teenage daughter whose evil twin takes over for a few years, the sassy wife who responds to any preening her husband may be inspired to do by his ``idiot fans'' by pointing to his two-digit bank balance, which she translates as ``nobody knows your name.''
 
 

White, who comes across as a younger, funnier, hipper Bill Cosby, should have his own television show. Imagine a cross between ``Home Improvement'' and ``Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist,'' with a little ``Simpsons'' tossed into the mix. You didn't have to be old to laugh at his stuff (his son's college roommate, sitting in the audience, claimed to get most of the old-fogy jokes) but it helped. ``In order to grok this,'' said White, before his impression of an 8-track deck, you had to know a few things about 8-track tape cartridges (including the fact that they were so huge they required two people to carry them and inevitably malfunctioned within 24 hours).
 
 

A special highlight of the set was a musical cameo by White's college-student son, Lawren, who played adroit electric-guitar leads on his dad's encore, ``I'm From Lynn.''
 
 

The show also included big responses for Camille West, the charming and sweet-voiced singer/humorist who replaced Christine Lavin in the ``Four Bitchin' Babes'' tour troupe. West, whose enormously likable demeanor and girlish voice recalled Madeline Kahn, got the crowd excited with her hit finale, about a town with a Viagra-tainted water supply.
 
 

Nancy Tucker, who opened the show, got off a few good Steven Wright-style ironies (the sign said ``quarterhorses for sale,'' so she bought four), but without the requisite deadpan delivery. Tucker's songs ranged from merely clever to self-effacingly funny, but toning down her somewhat cloying, children's-party-singer style could have made them more effective.