We’re in Las Vegas right now.  It’s chilly!  We landed just after noon on Wednesday.

Just 20 hours earlier, we were settling into our seats at the Helen Hayes Theater in NYC, awaiting the start of Colin Quinn’s one-man show, “Long Story Short.”   It’s a history of the world in 75 minutes, written and, of course, performed by Quinn and directed by Jerry Seinfeld.

Normally, when you tell a comic that you just saw something– a play, a movie, a whatever– they follow it up with, “Is it any good?”  We can’t help it.  That’s just the way we phrase things.  However, when we tell someone we saw “Long Story Short,” the reaction is “I heard it’s great.”  Quinn has concocted an evening of theater (an evening of standup, really, with a sparse set, some audio-visual ornamentation and frequent blackouts) that pierces the skeptical hides of comedians.

It is great.  It takes the audience through several centuries of the development of civilization– from ancient Greece, through Rome and right up through the found of America.  Hitting other hot spots like India, Africa, England, etc.  During  a recent appearance on Joy Behar’s HLN show, he said that he worked it all out on Wednesday nights at Governors, the venerable Long Island comedy club.  From Levittown to Broadway.  Makes sense to us.

Fifteen producers are listed in the playbill.  Is that normal?  One of them, Sheldon Fireman, is opening up a Brooklyn Diner in Dubai.  Makes sense to us.   What’s that old saying?  Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.

This isn’t Quinn’s first time on Broadway– His “Sanctifying Grace” also ran at the very same theater.

Quinn didn’t have to change his style to suit the venue.  He still uses the rapid-fire delivery, the sarcasm, the throwaway lines, the swearing (strategically placed F-words)– it’s standup comedy and lots of it, and not some sort of actorly exercise.  Quinn doesn’t work up any tears or try to evoke any kind of moments fraught with meaning or try to deliver any heavy messages.  At one point, he even busted a couple for coming in late!  It’s an hour and fifteen of standup in a fancy setting.  Which is why comics like it.  (Sarah Silverman was in attendance Tuesday evening.)

He teaches world history using analogies to modern life, modern culture– depicting England as a mopey, spurned lover, constantly pining for France, equating the Catholic Church after the fall of Rome to rap producers or comparing the buildup to the Iraq war to a late-night bar brawl.  At about the midway point, he savages the cinematic convention (cliche?) of the fish-out-of-water teacher who tames and eventually reforms the uncouth inner-city youths.  (We’re not sure if the audience picked up on the fact that the same methods used by Michelle Pfeiffer, Sydney Poitier, et al, are the exact same methods Quinn is using on this night.)

It’s also faintly reminiscent of Lenny Bruce.  Bruce dealt with substantive issues (sometimes historical, sometimes topical) by couching those issues in terms that a nightclub audience could easily grasp.  In Bruce’s case, he used the hipster or beat lingo and outrageous exaggeration and apt analogies.  Quinn uses his Brooklyn-ese, his unique attitude, a plethora of accents to do the exact same thing.  It’s a history lecture disguised as a freewheeling rant.  It’s deciptively well-written and exquisitely constructed.

Are we denigrating this production by calling it “an evening of standup?”  No.  If you read it that way, you’re bringing your own prejudices to the table.  We are doing quite the opposite.  We are saying that standup, when does this well, is as good and as rewarding as anything else presented in a theater– on Broadway or off.  Bad theater has never pulled down the art form of theater.  But for some damn reason, bad standup has, to the estimation of too many, pulled down the art form of standup.  Quinn elicited some of the biggest laughs from this roomful of New Yorkers using riotous, well-crafted stuff that one might easily hear at a comedy club.  Sadly, though, we suspect that most of the evening’s attendees wouldn’t be caught dead in a comedy club.  And most of the theater critics who rave about “Long Story Short” wouldn’t dream of giving the same respect to a comedian onstage on a Wednesday night at Governors.