The Boner Monologues

"You're about to be the 10th audience to hear The Boner Monologues," says Mike Duvall, pink-faced and mischievous, with a bushy white beard and a gravelly voice reminiscent of Tom Waits. "It's payback time at the Mock Cafe." Who else -- besides Waits himself -- could spoof Eve Ensler's show and be funny? Duvall has a high talent for comedy rooted in his sense of the bizarre, and one dream sequence in this routine comes close to exploiting his weird imagination. The Boner, in the dream, is a creature with its own mind that calls up Duvall on a Mickey Mouse phone and starts to bicker, until Duvall, in a fit of pique, knocks Mickey's plastic ears off. It's not a bad start, but Duvall never follows through. He closes down his Monologues early. For bulk, he weaves in a cantankerous routine about "Her Majesty" -- his wife -- which sounds like an old-fashioned comedian's complaint, but in fact features angry lumber and talking power tools. Duvall can deliver a well-controlled, surreal evening of stand-up when he wants to, but The Boner Monologues is a truncated effort.