IndyFringe Review : Phil the Void - See it!

Do well by yourself and get an advanced ticket to see one of the final shows of Phil The Void: The Great Brain Robbery. Phil Van Hest’s standup comic/philosophic/political act will kickstart your brain, make you laugh, make you flush in embarrassed self-recognition, and make you share some of his palpable anger and disappointment with the unsatisfactory status quo of our common political and intellectual situation. His act is definitely hilarious, but it’s not exactly diverting. It seethes with the furious compassion and commitment that always inspire great satire.

Before the show begins, Van Hest wanders the audience, chatting easily with the diverse crowd about everything from paper-milling to beer, and passes out a unique variety of show program: a bibliography. This little piece of paper offers a strong hint about the sort of show you’re about to see: the font and title is playfully ominous, and the source list ranges from St. Augustine to Steven Hawking, Howard Zinn to The New Yorker. And like any bighearted nerd, Phil can’t resist adding a few “just for fun” recommendations, which include my favorite Vonnegut and the spectacular A Confederacy of Dunces.

Van Hest’s show is about the Great Brain Robbery of which we’re all more-or-less-consenting victims. The menaces that beguile us into relinquishing our brains are often criticized, but seldom actually resisted: Facebook and other (anti)social networks (this blog, too, is clearly contributing to what Van Hest dubs the “consciousness feedback,” or snare of a muddled feedback loop between “real life” and our mediation of such life, through online documentation and pseudo-cultivation); telephones that relieve us from nuisances like remembering phone numbers, or addresses, or our own geographic locations; and the seductions of irrelevant detours on the Information Superhighway. Van Hest also targets other menaces we suffer, dipping into the politics of civil liberties, healthcare, and – of course – banking and the economy.

As I said, his show’s not diverting. Its purpose is to redirect our attention, to restore our consciousness to our own lives. Or, as Joyce put it, (I, too, am a bighearted nerd, I think) to remind us that the only way to live well as human beings (and responsibly as citizens, Van Hest might add), is to hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past. And to laugh along the way.