I've got love for Martin Lawrence. He fuses hilariously exaggerated physicality and vocal inflections with genuine charm and charisma. And with this concert I went in as affable as possible, but an audience can only suspend its goodwill so far.
Now I'm no baseball fan, but here an analogy does come to mind: Anticipating the return of an old school player (from the Himalayas), home plate is reverently dusted off for the older wiser champ to step back up to bat and show how maturity can adopt and adapt with smarter efficiency of technique. However, with a consistent barrage of material simply devoid of wit, Lawrence's aimless swings never connect, and when he settles for the bunt it unfortunately rolls right to first base, sadly making all his exerted efforts at still proving his intact run-and- slide capabilities no more favorable to the scoreboard.
Essentially it's an hour-and-a-half hanging with your friend who thinks humoring everyone with excessive bawdiness is the reason people like him. So he goes on an on... and on and on... an amiable buddy mistaking debased jokes for the basis for his place at the table (and maybe in youth we mistook it for being that as well). But really he's funny because of the exhaustive energies and affectations he lends to illustrating how he tells a story, not necessarily because his stories are inherently funny. And here is Marty-Mar's trouble; what he has to say is actually nothing special and kinda sad that he can't think of anything better. The main problem (outside of just baseness ad nauseam) is that he wants to do observational comedy while being blatantly disingenuous about the circumstances for such an observation. The most essential element for effective comedy is truth, even when lying you've got to be telling a higher truth. Here Lawrence lazily fictionalizes accounts of smoking weed with a ghetto-fabulous Obama family in The White House, and a bunch of explicit misogyny-tinged ruminations about the sensations derived from bodily organs and functions. It's tired low humor that an audience endures in vein while waiting for the funnier stuff that never comes.
C'mon Marty Mar -- you're a 50 year old man, and you're better than this!
