Rob Becker's `Caveman' Returns For A Third Visit

By Julia M. Klein

It's not exactly news that many men have trouble asking for directions or expressing their deepest feelings. Or that many women can muster more energy for shopping, cleaning and even talking than their husbands or boyfriends.

In fact, a whole self-help industry - mainly designed to help women deal with men rather than vice versa - has grown up around these observable cultural differences.

So what exactly is it about Rob Becker's Defending the Caveman, now on its third visit to Philadelphia, that keeps audiences in a state of hilarity for nearly two hours?

To my mind, it's that Becker - who opened his one-man hit show at the Merriam Theater Wednesday night - is able to capitalize on the very familiarity of his material. All Becker needs to do by now is set up each gag - and then let audience members fill in the joke from the ample well of their own experiences.

It's almost beside the point to say that Becker's material no longer seems terribly fresh. He doesn't really want to surprise us, but rather to make us complicit in his comic enterprise.

The underlying conceit of Defending the Caveman - which began life in 1991 in San Francisco, first played here in 1993 at the Movement Theatre International and had a record-breaking, 27-month run on Broadway - is that gender differences stem from a prehistoric division of labor.

The caveman, says Becker, was a hunter, whose aim was to track down and kill his prey. But the cavewoman was a gatherer, who allowed her focus to wander. From these origins, Becker explains with charming incongruity some contemporary quarrels over shopping preferences, remote-control usage, and even sexual techniques.

In the tradition of John Gray (Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus) and sociolinguist Deborah Tannen, Becker suggests that neither sex is to blame for misunderstandings. Instead, like anthropologists, we just need to study each other's signals, so we can decode them.

Defending the Caveman plays somewhat less well in the cavernous Merriam than it did at the much smaller Movement Theatre. Becker's sing-song delivery and poor enunciation, which sometimes made him hard to understand, are a problem.

Even after six years of performing the show, Becker is more standup comedian than actor. He gets his laughs largely with exaggerated mugging and broad gestures: His eyes roll back in his head, his head swivels around in surprise, his arms stretch out in a pose of martyrdom.

The entire show, which includes an opening video montage, is set against the backdrop of an imaginatively designed Stone Age living-room. It includes two bizarre cave paintings, emblematic of the two sexes.



"Looking Back On Highlights Of Phila. Stage

Several Plays Made It To New York, Where "Caveman" Is Still Running."

By Clifford A. Ridley

Before memories of the 1994-'95 season melt away, it's worth noting that several plays nurtured in Philadelphia theaters finally made it to New York during the year - and fared reasonably well, in the main, although only one is still running.

That, of course, is Defending the Caveman. Philadelphia can't claim to have spawned Rob Becker's stand-up routine about gender differences, which played two other cities before arriving at the MTI Theatre in 1993 for a run that would last nine weeks. (Becker later returned to town in the much larger Merriam Theater.) But Philadelphia's enthusiasm fed the mystique surrounding the show, which opened at Broadway's Helen Hayes Theatre in mid-March and is still there.

Word of mouth has lifted attendance above 70 percent of capacity even during the summer doldrums. His most enthusiastic notice came not from a critic but from a critic's wife - Leslie Bennetts, a writer married to Variety's Jeremy Gerard. When Gerard panned Caveman in the show-biz paper, Bennetts demanded equal time - and got it. Her rebuttal called the show "hysterically funny," and no comic ever asked for a better quote than that.


"Out Of The Cave"

Rob Becker Has A Theory On Why Men Are Men And Women Are Women. And Audiences Are Jamming Theraters To Hear Him Explain It.

By Douglas J. Keating

When he was in junior high school, Rob Becker discovered that he had the ability to explain the behavior of his boy friends to his girl friends and vice versa.

Nearly a quarter-century later, the boys are men, the girls are women, Becker is 37, and he's still at it, still explaining why members of the opposite sex often behave in opposite ways. Along the way, Becker became a comedian, and his observations on male-female differences are incorporated into a funny show called Defending the Caveman, which audiences have laughed their way through at sold-out performances in four major cities.

His 90-minute comedy riff is built around the theory that the differences between the sexes stem from approaches to life that became ingrained long ago when men were hunters and women were gatherers. He says that explains, for example, a man's view of shopping as a sort of hunt ("Me want shirt. Me get shirt. Go home, watch TV.") and a woman's attitude that shopping is a wide- ranging, not-to-be-rushed search for something that she'll know she wants when she sees it.

It's not a theory that's likely to win Becker a Nobel Prize in anthropological psychology (if that's what it is). But as entertainment, the show is impressing those who see it so much that they are doing what everyone in show business prays an audience will do:

They are urging their friends to buy tickets.

As a result, the show sold out for four months in San Francisco, where Defending the Caveman started in 1991. Moving to Dallas, it packed a comedy club for 11 months; in Washington, it ran for six sold-out months (including four nights at the 1,500-seat Warner Theater). Beginning his Philadelphia engagement in mid-September, Becker was selling out the 410-seat Movement Theatre International in West Philadelphia after the second week. His appearance has been extended week by week, and is now announced through Nov. 21.

A large, beefy man with an engaging smile, Becker has a relaxed, amiable stage personality that proves to be not a stage personality at all. Sitting in a booth in a West Philadelphia restaurant talking about his show and his life, he is pretty much the same boyish, humorous, friendly guy who performs Wednesday through Sunday evenings here.

Becker gets the show in gear by relating an incident that occurred at a party. You don't doubt it really happened when he tells the story on stage, so it's no surprise when it comes up in conversation.

"I've always had a group of women friends, and I've always had a group of men friends," said Becker, echoing a line from the show. "At a party, I was standing around talking to a group of women, and they were literally saying that the problem with the world was that men were . . ." - and here, he used a common, vulgar expletive, but you get the point.

"Nobody even questioned it; nobody raised any objections at all," Becker continued. "I'm a baby boomer who grew up in the '60s and '70s, and you're not supposed to say all blacks are something or all women are something, but suddenly you can say all men are . . . and insert whatever your favorite expletive is."

Not only did Becker not believe that he and all men were such jerks, but the conversation got him thinking about how little understanding there was between the sexes - how they were, in the words of the show, "two different cultures."

This line of thinking was kind of a revelation to him, Becker maintains. ''Growing up in the '70s, we learned you're not supposed to talk about men and women being different," he said. "We're supposed to be the same. You know that idea, that we would all someday form one gender? We really believed that."

At subsequent parties, Becker started bringing up the differences he saw between men and women, and he urged his friends to make their observations.

A native and still a resident of California, Becker was a college dropout who owned a sandwich-shop franchise in Santa Rosa in the early 1980s when he decided to try being a standup comedian.

He began driving into San Francisco weekly to participate in amateur nights at the city's many comedy clubs. Becker worked his way up from free performances to earning pizza or travel money with his jokes, to paid spots on a bill with several comedians.

By the mid '80s, he was getting gigs and laughs, but, he said, "I always thought I wasn't just right for standup comedy. There are a lot of people who do it better than I. They can walk up and do 10 jokes - bing, bing, bing - and get off. I always wanted a theme for my stuff. I wanted to tell a story."

Soon after Becker began developing the theme of the differences between men and women, his 45-minute comedy act was devoted entirely to the subject, and not everyone was pleased. His one-topic routine violated the standup-comedy format of bringing up a subject, telling a few jokes, moving to another subject, telling a few more jokes, and so on.

"Comedy-club crowds are the least adventurous crowds ever," Becker remarked. "I had comedy-club owners saying they wouldn't book me any more, and I had people walking out of the clubs saying, 'This isn't standup comedy. What are you trying to pull on us?' "

Becker was faced with the decision of continuing on his new course and risking his paycheck, or returning to the security of the one-liner humor the clubs expected. He stayed with the battle-of-the-sexes theme, intending to present it in a theater if the comedy clubs didn't want it.

For his comedy routine to develop into a theatrical presentation, Becker needed a unifying theme, which he found in the hunter-gatherer theory. The comedian doesn't claim to have invented the theory he applies with such imagination and wit, but he is vague about where he came across it.

"Some researchers have hypothesized this, but they're not allowed to say it because it can't be proven," he said. "As a comedian, I'm allowed to say it."

Becker began looking for a theater for his show, but he couldn't find a suitable one in San Francisco. The San Francisco Improv had told him that it wouldn't book him if his routine kept to a single topic, but business wasn't very good at the time and the club manager decided to take a chance on Defending the Caveman. It was so successful that the Improv booked him into its clubs in Dallas and Washington before Becker settled at last into a theater for the Philadelphia engagement.

After Philadelphia, Becker wants to take Caveman to Chicago and New York, then turn it into a television special before moving on to a new show. With a record of success behind him, he figures he'll be able to tape the show on his terms - at the full 90-minute length - and by so doing, get back at HBO.

The cable network wanted him to do a 28-minute version of Caveman for one of its comedian spotlight presentations. Becker not only turned the offer down but also seemed genuinely offended by it.

"They don't say that to Fiddler on the Roof. They don't say, 'Boil that down to a half-hour of the best songs.' It's really hard sometimes to get people to see the difference between a collection of jokes and this show, which needs all the different elements to work."

Becker isn't sure what subject he will take up next. He and Erin, his wife of seven years, had their first child early in the summer, and he said he could see himself doing a show about pregnancy, birth and parenthood - a piece, he jokes, that he could call Expecting the Cavebaby.

Meanwhile, the success of Defending the Caveman has attracted attention outside comedy circles. Becker recently appeared on the Today show; he does an occasional commentary on male-female behavior on public radio's Weekend Edition, and he has a contract to write a book titled Hunters and Gatherers: A Partnership for the New Stone Age.

As part of the marketing for Caveman, Becker invites groups of family counselors to attend the show. Some of the counselors recommend that married clients who are having trouble getting along see the show as an aid to improving their relationship while being entertained, he said.

Becker, too, thinks there is more to Caveman than laughs. "The only way to understand the battle of the sexes is to understand that we are different," he said. "Otherwise, your goal becomes to change behavior, to make someone be like you, which to me is the death of any relationship."

Becker himself is sometimes asked for advice, but he turns the requests aside. "I say, 'I'll be glad to give you advice on your relationship, but you have to realize you're asking for it from a comedian.' "

Why Do Men, Women Differ? He's Figured It Out, Put It On Stage

By Douglas J. Keating

It all began at a party, says Rob Becker. The discussion (initiated, of course, by the women) got around to the question of why men are such . . . well, such a body part beginning with the letter "a" (and we're not talking arms).

The discussion resolved nothing since, as usual in talks of this nature, the men and women couldn't even agree that men are indeed (to be euphemistic) jerks. But the incident got Becker thinking about why men and women are different, and that evening he had a dream and an epiphany of sorts.

In the dream he was visited by a caveman, and the encounter revealed to him why women and men act so differently and can't understand each other. It all has to do, Becker says, with the fact that in primitive times men were hunters and women were gatherers.

So, you're asking, what is this anthropological interpretation of human psychology doing in an entertainment section? It's here because Becker isn't a scholar, he's a comedian, and his hunter-gatherer theory is the theme for his very humorous, perceptive show, Defending the Caveman, which he is presenting at Movement Theatre International.

Becker spends 90 minutes applying his theory to different aspects of human behavior, and if laughter is any measure of conviction, he made believers of many in Wednesday's opening-night audience.

Why do women love shopping and men hate it? Simple, says Becker. For men shopping is hunting. ("Me want shirt. Me get shirt. Go home. Watch TV.") For women, though, shopping is a contemporary form of gathering, which is why they can go out with nothing much in mind to buy and spend hours looking for it.

Why do women love to talk? Talking is merely another form of gathering, in this case, information. Hunting, on the other hand, is a silent pursuit, which is why men are content to do things together and not talk much about it. They like to just hang out.

There are very few dead spots in Becker's extended comic riff. He is consistently funny. Belying his own picture of men as silent creatures, Becker has an awful lot to talk about in this information-packed show, revealing himself to be a formidable gatherer as well as a hunter with a sharp eye for pertinent detail.

A heavy-set man with a developing gut, Becker, 37, dresses in T-shirt, jeans and work boots. He's a big, shambling, ordinary-looking guy, with an amiable, personable manner. Although he is a standup comedian rather than an actor - and this is more an extended comedy act than a theatrical presentation - Becker is expressive in body and voice, equally able to adeptly evoke women in animated conversation and a blank-faced fellow slumped in a television- watching stupor.

Caveman has had long runs in San Francisco, Dallas and Washington, and it's easy to see why. Its comedy appeals to both hunters and gatherers. So if you go, men, take your lady, and women, take your guy. You may learn something about each other, even as you enjoy yourself.