From: jenkins@mhd1.moorhead.msus.edu (Lisa D. Jenkins)

Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 17:02:26 CDT

Subject: Articles on Joel Robinson's work as a stand-up comic

From: St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch*

Date: April 22, 1988

Headline: When Joel Comes Out to Play, Everyone Has Fun

Author: Protzman, Bob

Page(s): B7

Note: Review of Hodgson's new stand-up act.

It's said there's a little boy in every man, but comedian Joel Hodgson sometimes seems to be all boy.

Making a full-fledged comeback as a performer this weekend and next at the Comedy Gallery in Minneapolis, Hodgson used his clever imagination, his boyish fascination with toys and miscellaneous gadgets and gizmos and his child-like prankishness to delight his audience at his Wednesday night opening.

Hodgson, who sometimes refers to himself as a "gizmocrat," appeared onstage with several plastic laundry baskets full of his inventions and clever tricks. The sillier the trick or invention, the more it seemed to appeal to Hodgson--and in turn, the funnier it was for us.

He began his show with as stupid a trick as you could imagine. In the "attack of the cling peaches," several peachlike fuzzy balls attached to rubber bands sprang out of a can and landed on Hodgson's rather ragamuffin tuxedo. And being cling peaches, of course, they *clung* and had to be peeled off.

A series of other quick sight gags followed. Hodgson opened a woman's beat-up purse and flames shot forth ("Hell in a handbag," he said in his usual monotone style); he held up an everyday green welcome mat, except that water squirted from this one ("an unwelcome mat," he deadpanned); he put a tiny toy windup woodpecker in the middle of his forehead and, as it pecked furiously at his skin, he said, "I'm a tree."

Then there was his impersonation of "an invisible man at home," in which he lay on the stage floor, imitated a telephone ringing, then held up a yellow phone receiver attached to a metal rod.

The audience winced as one when Hodgson stapled a note to his forehead, then laughed with relief when he revealed it was all a gag, that he had used self-sticking paper. Hodgson had his audience gasping another time with a clever visual illusion that I won't reveal here.

As for inventions, some of the more ridiculous or outrageous ones displayed by Hodgson Wednesday included his device for integrating electronics and clothing, a bubble-making machine attached to a belt circling his waist, dubbed by its creator "a cummerbubblebund"; a gray rubber handgun "for nervous bank robbers" with a nose than can be pointed in different directions without moving the gun itself; a plastic baseball helmet with a net attached to its brim ("so that no matter where you sit, you'll feel like you're behind home plate"); and, finally, one of my favorites--a huge puff of cotton candy that, when bitten into, opens its heretofore hidden mouth and screams.

Oh, and you'll love Hodgson's safety device for motorcyclists.

A funny running gag in Hodgson's act was his "when I was a boy" and "now I'm a man" routine in which he demonstrated something he did as a kid, then followed it with an updated "adult" version of the same thing. The adult example always was bigger or louder--for instance, blowing the paper off a straw, followed by shooting a huge, oblong balloon off a motorized garden blower, or playing a kazoo, then attaching a bagpipe to the blower.

Not everything worked equally well, and there was at least one mechanical failure and perhaps less than perfect execution of several tricks. But overall, Hodgson's show was wonderfully amusing. It's good to have him back.