press clippings

July 8 - 14, 1999
You Are Now Entering Nellie Oleson
P.S. 122

by Ed Morales

The Nellie Olesons have bought into the notion that we're all so suffocated by p.c. attitudes that even us liberals don't know how to relax and have fun anymore. Supposedly we're so damned repressed that trotting out our deepest comic fantasies about handicapped people and minorities will have an effect somewhat akin to that of the sexual revolution. This could almost be a working proposition if You Are Now Entering Nellie Oleson's material were actually funny - but most of it isn't.
That's not to say I wasn't charmed by the raunchy quartet. They are agile and witty physical comedians with a deadpan flair for the bizarre. The depend heavily on musty genital humor - one routine features a husband feeding his child with his penis - but they too easily exploit feeble stereotyping, like with Cngresswoman Crackwhore and The Silly Faggot game show. The closing piece, the would-be TV pilot Cripple Creek, kind of works because it parodies the current trend of gross out, anti-p.c. humor by piling it on to absurd heights. It gets to the point where you can almost admit a gay man in a blond wig playing a bitter, deaf high school girl is actually funny.
There, I've loosened up. Got any more jokes?

Bay Area Reporter
Feb. 19, 1998

Foul Fare
Nellie Olesons: New High In Low Taste
by Richard Dodds

Ah, the refreshing stench of taste gone bad. The Nellie Olesons want to make you laugh with their jokes about snuff films and the way deaf people talk, but at a recent performance by the group at the New Conservatory Theater, the laughs had their rivals in silence and groans.
The New York-based comedy quartet is offering Full Frontal Nellie, its latest collection of proudly tasteless sketches, at NCT through February 28. In the 60-minute show, the group dashes through 27 short skits that try very hard to push the envelope. Predictably, there are hits and misses, but the misses aren't necessarily due to subject matter. Call it wit, insight, or a new spin, but too often tat thing that can have audiences laughing in spite of themselves is absent.
There are moments when the right ingredients fall into place. In one scene, for example, John Cantwell plays a gym queen who converses with an unseen friend. He dishes friends ("There's nothing worse than an anal scat queen") and diseases ("AIDS is so three years ago"). In another sketch, Nora Burns and Marissa Copeland play a pair of lesbian mommies who read a post-feminist fairy talk with simultaneous translations into a fractured language. this is funny stuff, but a few other scenes reach this level of humor.
The Nellie Olesons have previously performed at Josie's, and the looser atmosphere of a cabaret setting seems more appropriate for this material than a theatrical venue like NCT.

Backstage West
Jan. 9 - 15, 1997

Pulp Nellie at Highways
Reviewed by Daryl H. Miller

The Nellie Olesons may nip at the heels of straight America, but they take their greatest pleasure in biting the gay and lesbian hands that feed them. The New York - based comedy quartet has returned with a collection of two dozen comedy sketches that skewer family values, homophobia, closeted married men, politically correct lesbians, airh-eaded gays, and fetishes of all kinds. It's a mixed bag, more on than off. But when it misfires, as it does in a couple of particularly graphic sketches, it can be awfully squirm-inducing.
The best moments spotlight the performers' physical comedy skills and their ability to say the most outrageous things with a perfectly straight face. Some examples: Two married couples are seated at nearby restaurant tables. The wives are blathering on about something or other; but their husbands aren't paying a bit of attention; they're too busy making eye contact with each other. Suddenly, the men fly out of their chairs, and to music we know oh so well, begin dancing the Tony and Maria pas de deux from West Side Story.
Later we drop in on the opening plenary of a lesbian conference, which, of course, is sign-language-interpreted. The laughs come fast and furious as the signer delivers loopy translations of parts of the female anatomy and such celebrity names as Madonna, Lily Tomlin and Rosie O'Donnell. And, because no night of gay comedy would be complete with out one, there is an extended impersonation of Joan Crawford - or rather, Faye Dunaway's more-Crawford-than-Crawford in Mommie Dearest.
The bad bits are mostly unrepeatable in polite company, so we'll spare you those.

a letter from a "fan"
March 25, 1994

Dear Terrence Michael and the Nellie Olesons:

I'm writing to you with some comments regarding the performance of The Nellie Olesons' show, "Nellier Than Thou" that I saw at the Northampton Center for the Arts on Friday, March 18.
Frankly, I found some of your skits disturbing and offensive, particularly the one about the nazis "torture" and the skit about Jews. With both anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism on the rise in this country and abroad, I found them to be in bad taste. Why Nazis for this skit? Why not South African police? Or the death squads in any number of Central American countries? Or simply a generic torture squad? Your choice of nazis, with the blatant swastikas on their arms, made me feel extremely uncomfortable.
Your Jewish skit was nothing but a reinforcement of old stereotypes about Jews. I don't find anything funny about ethnic "humor" in general. In tis case, because I didn't see you treat other cultural groups in quite the same manner, your stereotypical treatment of Jews really stuck out and seemed harsh to me. It felt like Jews were singled out for this "portrayal", and I think there is a real danger of reinforcing anti-Semitic attitudes in your viewers, even if that is not the intent of the performance. I would ask you to consider this in your future shows.
Finally, for a group that is comprised of both women and men, to be honest, I felt the male voice and viewpoint coming through much stronger than the women's. Women, speak up!

Sincerely,
Dvora Zipkin