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Mike Marino, nicknamed “New Jersey’s Bad Boy of Comedy,” returned home in August of 2006 to perform his stand-up act in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and his 69-minute comedy routine is captured on his self-titled DVD.
Marino starts out by contrasting the Italian-American subculture in New Jersey to life in his new home, a city without Italians—Los Angeles. Though he makes references to driving the toll roads in his home state, which the audience obviously relates to, it’s still amusing for the rest of us. What if we had an Italian-American president from New Jersey at the time of 9/11? What would Family Feud look like if his family were on the show? How about if Baywatch took place in New Jersey with hairy Italian-American lifeguards, instead of in California with David Hasselhoff types? This kept me in stitches. We can relate to our mothers slaving over the stove at Thanksgiving and threatening never to prepare another meal, only to repeat the same process at Christmas and every holiday after. In the beginning of the DVD, Marino is on a roll.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t keep up the momentum. After about twenty minutes, he lost his originality—and my attention. His stories about experiences in Ikea, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the like were over the top, and they sounded way too familiar. And we all know the old sex and dating jokes. Yes, when you guys put out your fifties for dinner on a first date, you expect your dates to put out, too. We get that, and you comics keep reminding us.
What Marino really needed were more fresh references to pop culture. There were the driving with the cell phone jokes. He also had a brief bit on Gumby and Viagra that could have turned into hilarious material, had he expanded on it. Instead, he delivered the same old jokes about drugs and getting stoned. They were funny and novel with Cheech and Chong back in the 1970s—but, again, we’ve heard it all before.
What I actually found hilarious were the DVD’s extras, entitled “On the Road to Asbury Park.” This is where he supposedly tested out his material at Los Angeles area dives and coffee shops for food instead of pay, to prepare himself for the 1600-seat Paramount Theater in Asbury Park. I especially enjoyed his bantering with Brett Walco, who played a gullible “comic apprentice.” More of these skits and less of his stand-up act would have been worth the price of the DVD.
Mike Marino is naturally funny, and he has his delivery and timing down, but he needs to update his material and present something unique that will hold his audience’s attention for over an hour. There’s plenty of crudeness and vulgarity to work with in our culture, but is New Jersey’s Bad Boy of Comedy willing to seek it out? I hope so…for his sake.
