One Night Stand: Caroline Rhea

Review By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

Who wants to have a one night stand with Caroline Rhea? I’m talking about her HBO One Night Stand comedy special, a half an hour of Rhea’s scatterbrained observations and thoughts on life.

Rhea, blonde hair piled messily on her head and dressed like she’s going grocery shopping, jumps from one over-done topic to the next in her bland stand-up act. She starts off her routine by saying how excited she is to have the freedom of profanity on HBO. So I kept waiting for the risqué, the daring, or even just the remotely original, but it never arrived.

Instead Rhea stuck to the single-woman-comedienne basics: relationships and weight. She bashes her younger boyfriend, painting him as a cry-baby who says things like “You hurt my feelings” and weeps openly during arguments. She imitates his snoring in an excruciatingly long bit (okay, we know what snoring sounds like!). Rhea goes on so much about how sensitive her boyfriend is that I suspect by the end of the show he has already packed his bags and run crying home to mommy. Making fun of someone you love who gets easily offended? Probably not a good idea when you are 39 and still single. How’s that for a zinger?

Her most insightful and humorous observations are the differences between Southerners and New Yorkers (both are evil, just in different ways), the perils of having a fat face (it is a real hindrance when talking on the phone) and a new take on a particular line of dialogue from the Sound of Music (Mother Superior was one vicious nun!).

To hear Rhea tell it, her life seems to play out like one big joke. She’s the kind of person who always finds herself in embarrassing situations, but then she uses her misfortunes to give others a good laugh. For example, when she first moved to New York she saw a “No Standing” sign and crouched down on the sidewalk because she thought it literally meant no standing. It’s nice that she can make fun of herself yet be completely confident at the same time.

But sometimes, Rhea can get a little too comfortable with herself. Her attempts at being edgy by talking about her sex life end up going horribly wrong. Talk about too much information! It’s actually quite disturbing. I learned a little more than I bargained for about from the woman I used to only know as Aunt Hilda from Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

Caroline Rhea seems to have lost a little of her spark over the years. One of the special features is her Woman of the Night performance from nine years ago, and it turns out she was much more engaging then. She has sass and spunk and her material is both comical and relatable. She’s especially funny when describing her clueless parents. From explaining how they leave messages on her answering machine to how her mother ...