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January 23, 2015

In its humor, Everybody Gets Cake!, the comedy troupe Parallel Exit’s new show at 59E59 Theaters, is a throwback. Specifically, it’s a throwback to 1968. That is the year Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In took television by storm (after having been introduced as a television special in 1967). Everybody Gets Cake! is so reminiscent of the show that it’s presumably a homage. Not only do the rear panels of the set have doors like the Laugh-In wall (and, yes, performers stick out their heads to deliver jokes), but some of the characters we see are also clearly descendants of Arte Johnson’s. Structurally, too, the show is a child of Laugh-In, mixing recurring bits with one-shot gags. Less deliberately, it has the hit-or-miss quality of Laugh-In, too. The best material is wryly amusing, but not all of it works. That makes Everybody Gets Cake! a thinner show than Room 17B, the troupe’s rollicking 2011 offering at 59E59. A skit about a Novocain abuse hotline is pretty hilarious, as is one about an invisible rake. But the tone wanders from vignette to vignette, which makes it hard to latch onto the overall package.

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