Robert Dubac styles himself as a defender of truth and intellectual freedom, a lantern in the darkness of our culture’s myopic mores and media manipulation.
“I’m just trying to appeal to the nature of the human beast to entertain a certain point of view,” said Dubac, at right, whose one-man comedy show “Male Intellect: The 2nd Coming” continues through Aug. 25 at the Curious Theatre.
While it’s true Dubac makes us confront our mindless assumptions, he is also ultimately an entertainer. His show “The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron?” is well known to Denverites, having been performed here hundreds of times over the past decade. The show has also been seen thousands of times around the globe, taking on a life of its own in foreign cultures.
The one-man act shreds through paradoxes of gender identity, featuring characters that communicate the different slivers of Dubac’s personality, and the larger culture that birthed it.
We spoke to Dubac, a Telluride resident, last week about his new material, the freedom and limits of the stage, and the story arc of his “Male Intellect” trilogy.
Q: Did you know you wanted to do a sequel to “The Male Intellect” as soon as it became a hit?
A: There’s no a quick answer to that, but the sequel is part of a trilogy that will kind of draw it all together. The second one includes a little bit of the first show, and those ideas lead into what’s going to eventually be the third show.
Q: What’s different about it from the first show?
A: “Second Coming” is much more contemporary from a political, religious and media type of cultural-hypocrisy view, which doesn’t really fit in with jokes about men and women.
Q: What are the advantages or disadvantages of a one-man show?
A: Having the discipline to learn a script is hard, and it’s something most comics don’t have because they kind of just like to bounce around. But you can also paint yourself into a corner because these types of shows have to follow a script. It has to be written so well that it’s almost like a play.
Q: Do sequels keep you from getting bored with the format?
A: Yeah, because when something’s a success you have to do it even longer, but you’ve got all these other ideas in your head. You can’t start sneaking them into the old show and rewriting it, because then it’s a three-hour show that doesn’t make sense.
Q: How did you land on CBS’s “Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson” recently?
A: I was doing my new show in Florida, and a friend of mine that booked (Ferguson) said he needed an opening 20-30 minutes. I had never met him before but did some straight stand-up comedy and he was pretty impressed with it. He told me any time I was in L.A. to let him know. I was actually going to try to talk to him again this month.
Q: Do you like to think you work outside the systems of power you criticize in your show?
A: I’d love to think so, but it’s real easy to preach to the choir. If you have an alternative view you’re going to draw an alternative audience. The real challenge is to sit down and create dialogue with fundamentalist, Republican, Halliburton types. The truth is, I don’t think there’s anything different between a fundamentalist Christian who wants to shoot people going into abortion clinics, and a Muslim fundamentalist bomber.
Q: You once said the comedy club is “the last bastion of the freedom of speech.” What about the stage?
A: It’s even more so with the stage. It’s not something pre-recorded, and not something done in order to sell some kind of product. But every once in a while I drop in a comedy club, and most stand-up comics seem to be men or boys going through their adolescence.
Staff writer John Wenzel can be reached at 303-954-1642 or jwenzel@denverpost.com.
IF YOU GO
Male Intellect: The 2nd Coming
COMEDY|Curious Theatre Company, 1080 Acoma St.; various times, through Aug. 25|$30|
303-592-7953 or
