It's not a night at the Comedy Connection.  The stage is modest, the decor unpretentious.  It's a bare bones backdrop for the newish stand-up series at the Hong Kong.  Host Rick Jenkins, poking fun at the Harvard Square ambiance which geographically (and outwardly) defined this particular, Crimmins crowd, explained:  "We are trying to do something a little different here - these are not comedy shows, but 'opportunities to process issues' ".

        "In 1985", he continued, "comedy was like a primal scream.  Then as clubs discovered they could make money at it, they got more organized. The Hong Kong is trying to get back to the real, the stripped-down acts. Barry was there at the beginning - he put the heart into comedy in Boston."

         At the intro, Barry charged to the stage, already fuming and shouting in a clear transformation from the two mellow, mediocre opening acts.  "It's nice to be in a place where I don't get hassled by the acts", he commenced, and went into a spiel about bad improv comics discovered working in convenience stores following their xenophobic onstage jokes about foreign store clerks and cabbies.

         Barry has been absent from Boston stages for several years, except for a lone Passim appearance in 1996.  Here, he leapt into form, railing against the stock market and monopolies.  "I don't need any stocks," he maintained, "I use an Apple computer because I like to use my computer like I use my brain.  I used an IBM and the screen said 'illegal function' -- "what?  This is my f'in computer!  I'm the President of this computer!  I don't have to send my sh-t all the way to Washington State to get approved!  ... What a shock -- they decided that Microsoft was a monopoly!  Like Reagan having Alzheimer's and now the latest -- the Catholic Church admitted it's made some mistakes!  I'm shocked and stunned!"       

        "I have no idea how to pronounce the kid in Florida's name," he interchanged, turning to national news, "because every newscast pronounces it differently."

       Barry has never minced an opinion, and here he displayed his uncanny, scintillating format of cutting down to the actuality and relaying it in a witty manner.  "Why don't they come out with the truth - it's a hostage situation.  Why don't they just say what they want - we want two shortstops, a starting pitcher, and if you don't pay off, you'll never see the kid again, unless you have CNN.  It's amazing how freedom-loving all these Cubans got when they arrived in Florida. They didn't really care that much about freedom when Battista was running the country, but they got to Florida and then just suddenly -- it was an acquired taste, they just developed it.  Before, enslaving the entire island for the Mafia to turn them into busboys and prostitutes, well that was a wonderful thing. But once they lost the freedom to enslave them, they catch the freedom bug -- "yeah, get on the train, senor, we're heading north!"

         The U.S. critiques of Cuba were flattened and squashed by Crimmins.  Where America decries Cuban socialism, he raved: "the Pentagon is good socialism - Pentagon - good - like capitalists, but socialists at the same time!  They are like capitalists because they are greedy -- they’re so greedy they have an extra side on their building!  The original idea for that was like, 'how can we put a whole bunch more cost overruns into this project?  Has anyone ever made a five-sided building?'"

         Barry gave us a capsulized story about his comedic origins. "Everyone was doing crotch jokes....I wanted to do something different; I was like sort of interested in current affairs, so I figured, I'd do political stuff, not that many people were doing that, and at the time Nixon was President - and you can say a lot of things about Nixon, but nobody ever accused the guy of getting blown - it just never happened! The only sexual thing related to Nixon was that he was like herpes - you know, you think it was gone, but...."        

         The current election follows.  "No matter how humble your beginnings were, so long as your father was at least a Senator or maybe even the President of the United States, you can someday run for President of the United States.... It's like a legacy election -- 'If you don't vote, you got nothing to complain about!'  "A choice between the Republicans or the Democrats -- from the pretty far to the right to the extreme right."

         "The Presidency is kind of loopy", Barry pronounces.  "I mean, what kind of nut runs for the Presidency?  Really, think about the process of just going through the 'I looked at the entire world and there's one thing sorely lacking -- I'm not in charge!'  'Well, let us form committees that will worship you, egomaniac!'"

        "Nuts", he told us, "have become the swing vote in our country's campaigns.  "Reagan consolidated that nut vote -- Reagan Democrats - that means nut!  Nut!  Self-loathing sap vote -- you know, nuts!  Reagan -- 'Trees pollute more than cars do' - 'Hey you know, that guy's making sense!' "

         Barry was rolling.  "By 1992 Perot came along, and just took that nut vote over... Perot, I mean, only in the United States could you have a third party and it actually narrowed the choice, but that's what happened... I mean Perot is like a babbling nitwit, but because he had money, people acted like he knew what he was talking about -- he just blabbered.... You had Clinton, the pawn of big business; Reagan, the big business pawn; or you had Perot, big business."

         "They're talking about putting Reagan on Mount Rushmore -- now if they do that, they'll have to give Lincoln and Jefferson blindfolds!"

         "Giving Reagan credit for ending the Cold War is like giving Pontius Pilate credit for Christianity.  (Reagan rasp:) 'Tear down that wall -- I want to visit the rest of the S.S. graves.' "

         "Bill Bradley, he was the most progressive guy in there, and he's a disciple of Henry Kissinger's -- he digs Henry Kissinger's foreign policy.  Remember Henry Kissinger, in the Gulf War, when they called him to see if there should be a war 'hey, check with Henry Kissinger and see if there should be a war', that's like check with Pete Rosell and see if there should be a football game!  Henry didn't let us down -- 'We must be very cautious or war will be averted...the eventual extermination of a thousand innocent civilian lives will be needlessly spared...We must give atrocities a chance....' "

         Gore was not spared either.  "Gore has the charm of a wall-to-wall carpet salesman, combined with the natural ease of Ed Sullivan."  McCain?  "I'm sick of everyone thinking that just because somebody's a veteran, they're an expert on foreign affairs.  Think about when you've seen groups of sailors on-leave roaming around - did you ever say to yourself, 'now, that guy looks like a great candidate for a future Presidency!!' ?"

        Barry raged about the "rotting piles of stupid nuclear weapons" in varied American states.  "Get rid of them, tell me what your plan is for getting rid of them.  If you want to help the economy, spend whatever money it takes to get rid of that sh-t, and believe me, the economy will be humming for centuries!  I hate that stuff -- I hate it when it takes 2000 years to put out the garbage!  It's really terrible when you forget pickup day -- 'Oh d-mn!' "

         The war on drugs and U.S. jail systems were the next target. "People hate living in this world because nitwits like Al Gore are in charge, and they'd like to forget about it for a minute, so they use things to not make them feel so bad...20% of the prison population in the world -- We got 5% of the world's population -- land of the free?

         And he got serious, which is a banquet in the Barry Crimmins monologue.  He doesn't just complain, he offers simple solutions, and he makes sense.  "We should make the jails lawful places, where people who are in jail learn that laws are not only there to follow, but they're also there to protect you - So when you're in jail, you're not going to get raped, you're not going to be beaten up, you're not going to have to deal with gangs, you're going to be safe, you're going to learn that behaving in a civil fashion is a good idea. But jails are the most lawless places in our society, and that we're building them at a record rate means only one thing -- we're going to become way more lawless over the next several years, it's gonna get worse and worse and worse....

         "We're building prisons way faster than we're building schools.... We have a war on drugs, we don't have a war on despair, we're celebrating jail rape and acting like that's a good idea and a good idea to teach people -- I mean, that's really screwed up -- we gotta stop doing this, we gotta stop being cowards!"  I hate this prison, drug war crap -- I mean legalize drugs, illegalize despair!"

       We have always needed more Barry Crimmins'.  He's the thinking man's jokester who yet conveys deeply-held convictions about the things that deserve a heck of a lot more attention.  (Fittingly, Jimmy Tingle, another cerebral political jester and 60 Minutes II regular, was in the crowd.)  Barry deserves his own stage on National TV.  This show inexorably proved that he still blazes in high-key comedic glory.  Let's hope there are no further lengthy impasses for this impassioned, ethical crusader of the low-tech stage.