Men like to click the remote. Women like to shop. Men do stuff together. Women talk about their feelings.
Oh, come on, admit it! It's true! It's funny!
Comedian Rob Becker thinks so, or at least he thought so in 1991, when he first performed his solo play "Defending the Caveman" in San Francisco. From there Becker took "Caveman" to a record-setting Broadway run and a national tour; he played Boston a couple of times in the 1990s. This week "Caveman" is back, at the Stuart Street Playhouse, but Becker has passed the remote to actor Michael Van Osch.
Maybe Becker got tired after his 2,000th repetition of the same well-worn insights you could glean from a hundred sitcoms, stand-up routines, or self-help books. Or maybe he just doesn't need to tour anymore, now that a New York production company has bought the rights to franchise "Caveman": Eight different actors are now touring North America in the show, and more than 40 others are spreading its Neanderthal Gospel through Europe, Australia, and Asia.
Clearly, "Caveman" is saying something that audiences want to hear, and saying it in a way that entertains them. It's even been recommended by therapists as a way of helping couples understand and accept their differences - which, Becker argues, go all the way back to our prehistoric division of labor. And it is certainly gentler, less obnoxious, in its embroidering of gender stereotypes than a Howard Stern or Joan Rivers would be.
But that doesn't make it good.
The show plays a tricky game as it weaves from comedy to psychology and back again: Question its theories, and you're making too much out of something that's just supposed to be funny; object that it's not funny enough, and you're revealing your unwillingness to accept its fundamental truths about human nature. The fact is, though, that it's just not true enough to be great therapy and not funny enough to be great comedy.
Yes, I laughed; yes, I recognized some truths about relationships in the show's two-hour exploration of the ways that our prehistory as hunters (men) and gatherers (women) still affects our behavior today. But I also heard too many jokes I've heard before - the remotes, the shopping - and too much fake science. "Caveman" even cites the now widely discredited study "proving" that women utter 7,000 words a day, while men use only 2,000. It just isn't true, and even a caveman shouldn't still be saying that it is.
Van Osch, who's been touring in the show for a few years already, nicely inhabits Becker's shaggy, regular-guy persona; he has the bearish softness that makes the Caveman seem endearingly simple rather than hopelessly dense. But the fact that he's an actor performing another writer's lines, rather than a guy standing up to share some insights he's gleaned from studying human prehistory and his own marriage, muddies what was already a fairly confusing premise for the show. Namely: Is it a show, or is it just a guy talking?
That question, though, is ultimately less distracting than a few others: Why does the show focus so relentlessly on men and women in romantic couples, rather than considering how we relate to each other in social settings, at work, or in one-on-one friendships? Why is it so blindly heterosexist in its consideration of how relationships work? Why don't these married people ever even mention kids? And who bothers to program a VCR anymore?
The VCR line, like a couple of awkwardly updated one-liners about Britney Spears and iPhones, may offer one clue to the problem: For all its insistence on age-old insights, "Defending the Caveman" feels badly dated. It grew out of a specific moment in the relationship between the sexes - the same moment as Camille Paglia, Robert Bly, and "Men Are From Mars." We're in a different moment now. However fresh the Caveman may have seemed in 1991, at the dawn of 2008 he's even older than the 2,000-Year-Old Man.
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.
