Colin Quinn: Long Story Short

"Colin Quinn: Long Story Short" is a one-man stand-up comedy show directed by Jerry Seinfeld that successfully tells an honest, insightful, and sardonic history of the world in 75 minutes while making us laugh non-stop at ourselves. The show takes us on a tour through time and geography as it decodes the evolution of human civilization through the prism of the current state of global affairs. The show is both hysterical and liberating, as it is based on three major premises: human nature has always been the same, the joke has always been on us, and it is much easier when we choose to laugh at ourselves.

Quinn, who did a five-year stint on "Saturday Night Live," is a comfortable smooth talker that knows how to command a live audience and treat us to a terrific delivery. While Seinfeld's voice could be heard sporadically throughout the show, it was Quinn who mastered the art of hilariously tackling controversial subjects with impeccable timing. The audience laughed aloud from beginning to end, an accomplishment considering the diversity of topics that were examined: pornography, theology, race issues, reality TV, global warming, the economic crisis, drug use, Snooki, and more.

The show's ambitious goal of unveiling every major historical human civilization certainly paid off. The audience discovered how the evolution of the human body and the psychological evolution of the human mind have taken us exactly where we are today, which is, perhaps, exactly where we deserve to be. We also learned that people are a lot more similar to each other than they are different; we haven't changed that much through the course of thousands and thousands of years.

But instead of making us feel barbaric about the ways human beings have treated each other throughout history or guilty about our failures as a species, "Long Story Short" demonstrated that there is a lot more value in learning from our previous mistakes with a good sense of humor.

At times, some of the jokes did fall flat, but this was the exception rather than the norm. Colin Quinn's constant high energy never ebbed, and he kept the audience curious about what would come next, engaged with the material, and, most importantly, happy to be there. This is probably the act's greatest accomplishment and irony, considering that one of the major themes of the show was humankind's universal inability to be happy.

In the end, "Long Story Short" leaves the audience feeling like they have attended both a stand-up comedy show and the most fun world history lesson ever. The existential problems that we face as human beings are much lighter once we put them into Seinfeld's historical and anthropological perspective.

Go see this show, relax, laugh aloud, and, after it's over, take a moment to appreciate how far we have come as a species and how much further we have to go in this pivotal and accelerated point of human history.