The trouble with burlesque is that it's boring. As an art form, it permits little variation—some swish-boom music, costumes, a shtick, hip shakes and leg flexes and boob bouncing, plus the inevitable tassels. Repeat seven or eight times and, apparently, you've got a show. I don't understand what people see in it.
And I don't understand how Oh! Calcutta!, the "sexually liberating" "erotic revue" cooked up by British theater critic Kenneth Tynan, could run for 13 years, with a total of 5,959 performances. Nor why it was filmed in 1970 for the—inevitably banned—television broadcast. Nor why the DVD is now being released this year for the—inevitably indifferent—public. Oh! Calcutta! (the title is a French pun: "o quel cul t'as!" or "oh what an ass you have!") includes sketches by Sam Shepard, Samuel Beckett, and John Lennon—none of them very good. Beckett's seems like a hoax. It's one page, 40 seconds long, and titled "Breath." It follows, in its entirety:
Curtain.
1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold about five seconds.
2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about 10 seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.
3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in 1) in about 10 seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold about five seconds.
Curtain.
The rest of the acts are just terrible—relics of bad 1960s soft rock, prurience, and shocking misogyny. In the first sketch, a boy (Jack) cajoles a girl (Jill) into foreplay, even though she's shy. "I'm scared of you 'cause you're a boy," she says. "There's nothing to be scared of," he says. Then he rapes her. And curtain. (And ugh.) There is a chorus singing out sex ads and Penthouse-style letters ("I covered his cock with cream cheese and then stuck a bagel on the end of it!"). One couple has a post-coital fight because she's too bossy in bed. There's some naked dick flapping and boob groping masquerading as modern dance. Surprisingly, John Lennon wrote the quickest, funniest sketch, outgunning Sam Shepherd and Jules Feiffer. In Lennon's, four men masturbate simultaneously and stare at a telepathic screen that displays whatever each imagines to the other three. It's all breasts until one guy starts fantasizing about the Lone Ranger. The others are outraged. That is Oh! Calcutta!'s Mt. Funny. Everything else is like walking through the Valley of the Shadow of Dull.
And yet, it ran for a faux-titillating, grindingly dull decade. The critics hated it but the people couldn't get enough. So if any of you burlesquers fail to understand how some of us might find your "sexually liberating" "erotic revues," really self-indulgent and boring, rent Oh! Calcutta! and prepare to be mortified to see yourselves like we see you. (Without the rape, of course.)
