Way, Way, Way Out There

Emo Phillips

At the Hasty Pudding

IF YOU TOOK Marcel Marceau, dressed him like a third grade geek and gave him extensive electroshock therapy you'd create a creature very similar to Emo Phillips. Give him an abused childhood and a wretched lovelife and you'd provide most of his comic material.

Half an hour late, Emo flapped and blinked onto the Hasty Pudding Theatricals' stage, awkward and gangly, wearing too-big checked pants, belt cinched somewhere around where his pectorals should be. Enthusiastic whines of "Eeeemoooo, "Eeeemoooo" rose from the audience.

His proboscis weighing his head forward into a bashful stoop, and his Prince Valiant hair clanking against his forehead, Emo introduced himself: "My name is Emo. As opposed to Emu...which is a tall, ugly skinny creature with a big beak. No resemblance there...." Laughter.

Emo has created a stage persona more pathetic than Woody Allen, more whiny than The Pathological Liar and about as bizarre as Sid Vicious. He makes it clear from the start that he's a geek, a psycho, a loser, and that we should laugh at him.

HE'S SICK, BUT there's a childlike, pitiful innocence in his perversion that keeps it from being too disturbing. His third-grade whine, soulful blinking eyes, stumbling toddler steps and flapping arms all serve as a pampering screen between him and the cruel, sick world. And, just as necessarily, between his sick mind and the audience.

Thrown in jail, Emo asks his cellmate what he's in for. "'Sodomy.' I figured he was a lawn installer or something....Well, it pays to increase your vocabulary."

But we also get to see this innocent babe turn on the world that has twisted him. Emo goes to the zoo and starts to dream about the greedy, warring humans locked behind bars, and the animals free. The loose animals "start to jam to the Animals Square Dance."

But after frolicking happily for awhile, Emo's animals start butchering each other. Emo's song ends with the monkey committing suicide "by screwing his head into the light socket/and the birds picked him clean/and the people thought he was a wiiind chiiime."

"That song," continued Emo, "represents my philosophy of life. Why do people hate people for their race, for their creed, for their religion... when there are so many real reasons to hate them?"

But you won't hate Emo Phillips. He's weird, and he's whiny, but he's very funny. Whether his exaggerated appearance and style helps or hinders his material is beside the point--it all works. You'll leave singing the Animal Square Dance, electrocuted monkey-bone wind chimes tinkling in your head.