Stroke of Genius: Pantomime Masturbation Throughout Performing Arts History - Bopiled Horse Productions

“Stroke of Genius” is an absolutely perfect title for this brilliantly bawdy performance. Audiences beware because the dick jokes, ribald puns, and sight gags spew forth in this performance-cum-lecture appropriate only for mature audiences with an immature sense of humor.

Presented as an academic lecture, Shane Mayforth depicts Dr. Walter Winkworth-Perez, the world’s foremost expert on “pantomime masturbation throughout performing arts history.” Anyone who has ever attended a theatre history course or film studies lecture will appreciate this parody of academic analysis. Dr. Winkworth-Perez hits on all the usual subjects of Western performance history including ancient Greece, the Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, up through post-WWII protest art. Combining factual history with fiction, Mayforth uses hilarious visual representation provided by an ingenious powerpoint.

Part II of the lecture veers into cinema history with film clips of Ira K. Goldsmith, a fictionalized star of classic stage and screen who earned the moniker, “The Spankin’ Shyster”. Played by burlesque performance artist Vulva Va-Voom, these film clips demonstrate a wide range of filmic genres from Charlie Chaplin-esque slapstick to Douglas Fairbanks’ piratical adventures, and (my personal favorite) a spoof of D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” with suitably revisionist historicism.

While the risqué and downright dirty humor is funny in itself, the performance is elevated with prescient satire on higher education. The professor provides absurd quantitative data analysis after each film clip. The trustee of an independent foundation who is sponsoring this research keeps interrupting with her own agenda. Even the concept of a professor whose research is so ridiculously niche rings true to anyone who has spent time in contemporary academia.