Comic will do almost anything for laughs

By Nick A. Zaino III, Globe Correspondent  |  February 4, 2006

Rudi Macaggi likes you. And he's willing to do almost anything onstage to prove it. He'll do a headstand on a basketball balanced precariously on a short stool. He'll do back flips dressed as Pavarotti, tap dance, sing show tunes, and tell jokes. And if you show up early to one of his shows at Jimmy Tingle's Off Broadway Theater, where Macaggi began a monthlong run last night, he may even help you find your seat.

''I do not say that I'm part of the show," Macaggi says of his pre-show mingling. ''They think it's a crazy fool doing weird stuff."

''I Like You" is the name of Macaggi's show and his catchphrase, delivered with a magnetic grin in a voice that falls somewhere between Roberto Benigni and Squiggy. If he hears someone laughing louder than the rest of the audience, he'll zero in and deliver it directly to them, sometimes pretending to leap at them, or covering them in toilet paper spun off the end of a leaf blower. His movements are precise, even when he dances awkwardly to James Brown's ''I Feel Good."

His catchphrase was inspired by a woman in the audience who laughed after a stunt went wrong. ''I was confused one time and I fell in the [middle of a] trick, and I got up and the lady was laughing so hard, and I was a little bit shocked," he says. ''I was confused. And the thing that came out of my mouth was, 'I like you.' "

The phrase stuck, just like other elements of the act he's picked up along the way. Audiences at Jimmy Tingle's might get to see him add guitar to the show, something he started working on last year. ''Every time I picked something up, I never put it back down," he says. ''I always stuck with it."

Part European circus performer, part prop comic, part old-time Hollywood entertainer, Macaggi stands at the confluence of a century of performing-arts traditions. He grew up a third-generation acrobat in a circus family in Milan. After his family moved to the United States in 1982, Macaggi studied tap dancing with Henry Le Tang, choreographer of films such as ''The Cotton Club" and ''Tap" with Sammy Davis Jr. and Gregory Hines. He calls Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, who have always been his heroes, the best slapstick comedy duo he's ever seen.

Slapstick is an art Macaggi hopes to bring back to live performance. ''I think we should be innovating visual comedy again," he says. ''I don't think there's enough of it out there."

Rudi Macaggi appears in "I Like You’’ through Feb. 26 at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway Theater in Somerville. 7 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, 3 p.m. Sundays. Tickets $22 Fridays and Sundays, $25 Saturdays. Call 617-591-1616 or visit www.jtoffbroadway.com.

''The Areas of My Expertise," John Hodgman (Dutton); ''Me Write Book: It Bigfoot Memoir," Graham Roumieu (Plume): Each book depends on one premise to carry it -- complete lies about history in Hodgman's case, Bigfoot as a washed-up celebrity in Roumieu's. Both ideas would wear thin quickly if the books weren't so skillfully done. Hodgman and Roumieu are masters of the absurd detail. Roumieu has Bigfoot hanging out with Andrew Dice Clay and Morris the Cat at the height of his fame, only to wind up taking a series of odd jobs to try to survive. Roumieu's artwork is childlike but versatile, and he's able to wring real pathos out of a shadowy watercolor of his subject sitting in a forest holding a sign that says ''Help: Bigfoot Poor." Brookline native Hodgman goes the extra step of cross-referencing almost every chapter in his faux ''almanac of complete world knowledge," weaving a wonderfully impenetrable universe. Readers will not only learn all the variations of the ''Fifty-five Dramatic Situations," including ''Devil worshippers v. Apartment dwellers" and ''Evil cousins thwart romance," they will find the book to be rich in ridiculously inaccurate details (Hodgman writes, for example, that FDR was considering releasing polio into the national water supply to repel a hobo revolution). Both authors present their material with the equivalent of a literary poker face, never giving away the joke. That's what makes them both hysterically funny.

Dom Irrera, as funny a pure stand-up as you'll find on the club circuit today, plays the Comedy Connection tonight. . . . Julius Sharpe returns to the Comedy Studio tonight with Mike Baker, Patrick Bulger, Joe Cronin, Paul Day, Chris Fleming, Andrea Henry, Pat McCloud, Tom E. Morello, and Robby Roadsteamer.