On the “Citizen Brain” Monologue:

Josh Kornbluth’s ‘Citizen Brain’ seeks to spread a kindness contagion.

From my fast-fading database of college memories, I recall an ad hoc rock-and-roll comedy group comprised of smart lefties. It was called Derek and The Dialectics. David Remnick, who would later become the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The New Yorker, played guitar. Future storyteller Josh Kornbluth, sang songs and charmed the audience. Despite their campus appeal —the progressives and misfits adored them — they split up after just two performances and went their own ways, Remnick to pursue a life of letters, Kornbluth to continue his antics on his own time. For years Kornbluth made a living writing and editing for left-wing publications. But he eventually worked up the courage to go pro with his shtick. In 1992, ten years out of college, he debuted in New York on Upper Broadway – the bohemian West Side – with a new kind of solo storytelling. His first show was called Red Diaper Baby, blending comedy with sober reflection to illuminate a socialist childhood growing up with card-carrying parents.

It’s a story rarely told, but I love it. Not just because I was in a rival band that went by the name, Julius and the Rosenbergs (where the lead vocalist was a ventriloquist’s dummy). I love it because the two young comrades in arms found practical ways to fight the war, which they later defined for themselves.

Thirty years later, Kornbluth is still at it, performing his latest autobiographical monologue, Citizen Brain, which is completing a short run at the legendary SF venue, Club Fugazi. Ten months from the presidential election, he is hoping – comically and somewhat seriously – to spark an “empathy revolution” — neither red nor blue — that might help to create a better and kinder nation.

I say “somewhat seriously” because the comic grandiosity of Kornbluth’s vision is a consistent thread in all of his work, weaving topical and historical ruminations with parallel stories about his parents and their dream that someday he’d lead a socialist revolution. In Citizen Brain, for the first time, he gives mother Bunny a protagonist role by narrating her transformation from a wife in loveless marriage to the first love in her life, after her husband passes. The story takes a sorrowful turn when her new boyfriend, Frank, succumbs to Alzheimer’s Disease.

All the while, Kornbluth is telling the story of how he came to be selected for an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the University of California in San Francisco. During the one-year-long fellows program, he and his cohorts are advised on how to positively impact the world. After learning that a normally functioning brain has an “empathy circuit,” which can be shut down as dementia takes its toll — and that the circuit can be reactivated with certain stimuli — he informs his program mentor the has found the subject for his project: reactivating that circuit for not only just victims of dementia but for people whose empathy circuits may have been blocked by the political divide in our country. He imagines the collective intelligence of the US in a map of the brain — a Citizen Brain — like the kind of data visualization you see on MSNBC that Steve Kornacki uses to happily explain why your candidate is screwed.

[Spoiler alert!] Then comes one of the best comic sets pieces. After he shares his dream with his mentor, he’s asked what demographic he’s chosen for his experiment. He answers, Berkeley. The mentor admonishes, “go bigger.” Timidly, Kornbluth replies, “the East Bay.” The mentor says, “go bigger.” The schtick goes on and on until Kornbluth shouts that his demographic is the entire planet. The mentor concedes, “that’s big.”

It reminds me of my favorite scene in the original film version of The Producers, by Mel Brooks, where Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder go back and forth, with Wilder increasingly wound up to the point he breaks down (“I’m in pain! And I’m wet! And I’m still hysterical!”). Kornbluth’s skill in performing two characters – deftly paced by director David Dower, who has worked with Kornbluth for decades – is a tribute to modern solo storytelling technique as well as Depression-era Jewish comedy, which aimed to leaven social commentary with lots of laughs. When Red Diaper Baby premiered, I was tickled to see in the playbill that the director was Josh Mostel, son of Zero, who first honed his chops doing comic lectures on serious topics for The Public Works of Art project, a New Deal program that employed hundreds of artists.

Were our government the welfare state it once was, perhaps Kornbluth would have the foundation to scale his effort to fulfill his dream. Instead, he will need to practice the methods of viral marketing to super spread his “empathy contagion,” a concept that helps explain why people tend to learn and mimic the behavior of people around them (like when babies in a hospital all start crying when one of them cries). Kornbluth’s digital lessons in empathy might be good for that, if groups of people watched them together. But there’s no place like a live meeting space to begin the buzz. Throughout the show, I noticed how when one person would “hmm,” a random network would hmm sequentially. It was as if the audience were a micro Citizen Brain, with the empathy circuit switched on.

So, can a comic storyteller spark a global empathy revolution? Perhaps, with the help of others. It was only deep into the story that I realized that Kornbluth’s method is not to try to persuade people across the aisle (in one bit, he shows how disastrous that can be). Instead, he is training, not preaching to, the choir – theatergoers who spend their lives in their own bubbles. By helping us see the world in another person’s shoes (for those who caan’t), he can help us take action to bridge the divides, with our angry uncles at Christmas, and with the opposition on Election Day. Could the 2016 election have gone differently for Hillary had she and her team were more empathetic? Would she have won the battleground states that she flew over? Who knows? But with a better-functioning Citizen Brain, we can pause and breathe, as Kornbluth does, before we engage with our enemies.

Hartford Courant:

Things to Do

Arts

Comic monologist Josh Kornbluth mixes brain science with social justice at Real Art Ways

By Christopher Arnott | carnott@courant.com | Hartford Courant

UPDATED: October 4, 2024 at 4:21 p.m.

Josh Kornbluth makes his grand return to Real Art Ways in all his rumpled naturalistic comedic brilliance with his monologue “Citizen Brain.”

The 70-minute show, running Friday through Sunday, is Kornbluth’s latest mingled musings on his own life, scientific principles and American culture. “Citizen Brain” in particular attaches a study of neurology to recent observations of national politics.

A phone interview with Kornbluth is like getting a special private performance of one of his wide-ranging, thought-provoking and hilarious one-man shows. Kornbluth was part of the golden age of counterculture solo performance in the 1990s, up there with Eric Bogosian, Danny Hoch, John Leguizamo and Spalding Gray, and is one of the few of that pantheon who still regularly creates new solo work. He talks about his life and work in intricate, endlessly amusing detail.

He came to his career as a monologist from several different directions. He was working at the Boston Phoenix newspaper and was encouraged to perform in a sketch at a going-away party for one of the alt-weekly’s writers. Around the same time, he saw Gray, the exemplary autobiographical storyteller, perform at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts and thought “This guy’s awesome!” Kornbluth’s father had recently died and he was working through his emotions about it. He saw something special in Gray’s uncompromising self-reflective stories and adapted the first-person live medium for his own interwoven thoughts on society, history, academia and personal or cultural upheaval.

A turning point was when Kornbluth asked Charlie Chesterman, the singer/guitarist for the Boston roots rock band Scruffy the Cat if he could do a monologue between the band’s sets on an Acoustic Night at the club T.T. the Bear’s Place in Cambridge. He was allowed to as long as Chesterman could borrow Kornbluth’s special Martin guitar for the second set. It was a fraught night: “He dropped my guitar off the front of the stage,” Kornbluth recalled, “and I caught it.” But chance encounters there and at other appearances led to other opportunities. He eventually moved to San Francisco, where he established himself at small clubs and open mics.

“I’m still doing it and I love it,” said Kornbluth, who long ago evolved to doing long-form solo shows in theaters.

The piece he’s bringing to Hartford, “Citizen Brain,” “started back in late 2016, early 2017. I was an artist in residence at the Zen Hospice Project (now the Zen Caregiving Project). I learned about the Memory and Aging Center run by Bruce Miller. I sent him an email and was invited to be a fellow. The fellows were mainly neurologists and like that, but they also wanted artists,” Kornbluth said.

“I started doing this just as Donald Trump became President,” he added. “I had been looking at brain scans and they looked like maps to me, like maps of the United States. I thought ‘Oh my god, could our country be getting dementia?!’ It’s a collective brain and it’s diseased. Can I fix it?”

As with any Kornbluth monologue, there are tangents and subplots and thematic connections. Family members can be recurring characters that appear in many of his stories.

“All my stories about my father telling when I was a child that I am going to lead a revolution,” he said. “The revolution in ‘Citizen Brain’ is a worldwide revolution of empathy. There is also an empathetic connection with my mom” in the piece.

There is also, he said, “a lot of stuff about dementia.”

“Citizen Brain” was commissioned by the Shotgun Players theater company in Berkeley, California, where it premiered in 2020. Kornbluth created a related series of videos devoted to “connecting brain science with social justice” that can be found at citizenbrain.org.

Kornbluth hasn’t played Real Art Ways in years, but he was a big attraction there in the 1990s when the venue was as well known for live performances as it was for being a cinema and an art gallery. According to its executive director Will K. Wilkins, the current expansion of the RAW space into other areas of the 56 Arbor St. building it has occupied for decades and recently purchased will include a new performance space. It was Wilkins who invited Kornbluth back to Hartford as a way of celebrating RAW’s history of innovative performance while looking ahead to its expansion. Kornbluth will perform in the 150-seat cinema space.

One of Kornbluth’s funniest shows, “Ben Franklin: Unplugged,” is structured around one of his Real Art Ways appearances in the late ‘90s. Obsessed with his striking physical resemblance to “the man on the $100 bill,” Benjamin Franklin, Kornbluth extended his Connecticut visit to include a research project at the Franklin Archives in Yale’s Sterling Library.

The main topic of all Kornbluth’s shows appears to be himself, but he really uses his own life and experiences as a jumping off point for musings of parent/child psychology, American history, communism, capitalism, Jewish identity, grief and whatever else is on his fevered neurotic mind.

His first major piece, the coming-of-age saga “Red Diaper Baby,” is still probably his best-known stage work but it’s one of a dozen monologues he’s done. Two of them, “Haiku Tunnel” (based on Kornbluth’s time as a temp worker for a law firm) and “Love & Taxes” (about Kornbluth’s simultaneous problems with both those things) were filmed and can be found on streaming services. You can also listen to many of Josh Kornbluth’s monologues on audiobooks found on Audible.

It is clear from these recorded versions, however funny and insightful they can be and however worthy they are of rewinding and rewatching, that a Kornbluth performance is best experienced live. He workshops his monologues before live audiences and genuinely appreciates the crowd reactions, from laughter to gasps to tears.

“I develop my shows entirely through improv,” he said. “Everything I wrote down, I didn’t like,” so he created a different process. He does do some writing, however there are long entertaining descriptions of his monologues, including stories of how they came to be, on his website. He also started a Substack which he titled “But Not Enough About Me.”

“Basically I come out and I talk,” Kornbluth said about performing live. “The shows started getting longer and longer, but this is my shortest show. It’s 70 minutes.”

Josh Kornbluth performs “Citizen Brain” Friday and Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. at Real Art Ways, 56 Arbor St., Hartford. $40, $35 RAW members, $15 students. realartways.org.

Originally Published: October 2, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.

The Colin McEnroe Show (Connecticut Public Radio [CLICK THIS LINK TO LISTEN]:

The Colin McEnroe Show

Monologuist Josh Kornbluth wonders if our society is suffering from political dementia

By Jonathan McNicol

Published October 4, 2024 at 1:00 PM EDT

Listen • 43:53

Mark Mirko

/

Connecticut Public

As a fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute, monologuist Josh Kornbluth started to see parallels between brain disease and, well, everything that’s going on in our politics today.

With his new solo show, Citizen Brain, he hopes to “spark an empathy revolution.”

Josh Kornbluth joins us in studio for the hour.

GUEST:

• Josh Kornbluth: A monologuist, author, and actor, and he writes the But Not Enough About Me Substack

The Colin McEnroe Show is available as a podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Listen Notes, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and never miss an episode!

Subscribe to The Noseletter, an email compendium of merriment, secrets, and ancient wisdom brought to you by The Colin McEnroe Show.

Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

Colin McEnroe and Dylan Reyes contributed to this show.

Tags

The Colin McEnroe Show 2024 Election

• twitter
• facebook

Jonathan McNicol

Jonathan is a producer for ‘The Colin McEnroe Show.’ His work has been heard nationally on NPR and locally on Connecticut Public’s talk shows and news magazines. He’s as likely to host a podcast on minor league baseball as he is to cover a presidential debate almost by accident. Jonathan can be reached at jmcnicol@ctpublic.org.

See stories by Jonathan McNicol

On the “Haiku Tunnel” Film:

Kenneth Turan, LOS ANGELES TIMES [full review]:

Office temps are not ordinarily thought of as heroic figures in the James Bond mold. And transcribing and mailing “17 very important letters” in a timely and professional fashion may not sound like an exceptional challenge. The droll and disarming “Haiku Tunnel,” however, sees things just a little bit differently, and that is its charm.

A sly and captivating comedy of imaginative leaps and gently orchestrated pandemonium, “Haiku Tunnel” is built on the skills, sensibility and astute comic presence of co-director, co-writer (both with brother Jacob) and star Josh Kornbluth. He’s conveniently cast as a character named “Josh Kornbluth” who worked for a very powerful attorney once upon a time.

Introduced like 1950s TV’s Mr. Wizard, surprised while carefully threading a projector, the actor takes grave pains to tell us that while he perfectly understands the temptation “to think this is based on the real me, nothing could be further from the truth.” In an even more craven attempt to avoid being sued by that very powerful attorney, Kornbluth has even changed the story’s locale to “the best place on Earth, San Francisco.” “Haiku Tunnel” (named after a favorite clerical project, typing the endless specs for an engineering project in Hawaii) started as a stand-up monologue Kornbluth developed while living in the Bay Area, “one of thousands of aspiring novelists supporting themselves as temps.”

Kornbluth has a wry and telling eye for the minutiae of office life, for the emotional damage of realizing the boss spends more on business trips than your entire childhood cost, for the endless orientation lectures (yes, that’s Harry Shearer holding forth on clearing copy machine jams), even for how we fall in love with office supplies. Kornbluth’s “own personal weakness” is Uniball micro-pens: “They never explode in your pocket. They just expire one day and so gracefully. They’re like the Camille of pens.”

“Haiku Tunnel” is characterized by these amusing, open-ended riffs that can start anywhere, from how attorney names differ from secretary names or how exciting our hero found just showing up for temp work: “‘Hello, I’m from Uniforce.’ Just the name alone filled me with such pride.” Until he started to worry that there was a one-to-one ratio between agency and temp, making him literally the uni in Uniforce.

When Josh gets assigned to the law firm of Schuyler & Mitchell (S&M for short), his imagination goes into overdrive. He envisions head secretary Marlina D’Amore (Helen Shumaker) as a Darth Vader figure (a chill wind enters the soundtrack with her) and starts to think of his boss, attorney Bob Shelby (Warren Keith) as the Prince of Darkness, a notion that he finds a goad to work harder: “Just on the off chance he was Satan, you’d want to make a good impression.”

After a few days at S&M, however, Josh is faced with the great crisis of any temp’s life: the opportunity to “go perm” and have his psychotherapy covered by the film’s health plan. Also, his new status would improve his relationship with his trio of fellow office workers: the spirited Mindy (Amy Resnick), the chatty Clifford (Brian Thorstenson) and the distant DaVonne (June Lomena).

Once he makes his decision, however, Josh’s careful life crumbles and he ends up facing a variety of crises that start with those 17 un-mailed letters and end up involving high security office buildings patrolled by Rottweilers, the world’s oldest office mail boy, and a completely unexpected romance with a very confused Julie Faustino (Sarah Overman).

Coping with all of this brings out the best in Josh the office Galahad and Kornbluth the comic performer. With metal-rimmed glasses and long hair framing a balding scalp, he is a cherubic figure who creates complicity by combining smart timing, a self-possessed delivery and a face that’s adept at registering gravity, sadness, delight and more. Light on his feet in an array of Hawaiian shirts, Kornbluth can make anything killingly funny, even the specter of 17 letters, un-mailed but very, very important.

Mick LaSalle, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE:

[“Haiku Tunnel” is] a winning comedy about a would-be novelist who is living in a depressive funk and working as an office temporary worker. … [Josh Kornbluth] is likable, emotionally true and has no trouble carrying a movie. … He doesn’t just recognize the absurdities of office conversation. He knows how to satirize it in a way that the pain underneath also comes through. … “Haiku Tunnel” should be well received everywhere.

Owen Gleiberman, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY:

Remember the name Josh Kornbluth! “Haiku Tunnel” traces, in squirmingly funny detail, the drudge-slave hell of being a temp secretary.

David Germain, ASSOCIATED PRESS:

“Haiku Tunnel” [is] a clever, sometimes hilarious rumination on employment that will resonate with millions of minions tediously toiling in an office. … “Haiku Tunnel” uses its simple premise to make an entertaining, unpretentious statement about the pros and cons of committing, whether to a career, a relationship or simply cleaning up an unkempt apartment. … Be sure to visit “Haiku Tunnel” to see Kornbluth, a temp who’ll remain permanently etched in your mind.

Joe Morgenstern, WALL STREET JOURNAL:

“Haiku Tunnel” bills itself as “an office comedy,” but this winning little wisp of a film is actually about neurotic underachieving and the infantilization of workers, especially temps; it’s the office of a malign kindergarten. … The version of office work that’s offered up by “Haiku Tunnel” is as chilling as it is funny. There’s a whiff of Samuel Beckett — a sort of “Krapp’s Last Scotch Tape” — along with cheerful echoes of those charming old Robert Benchley one-reelers from the 1930s. … Surprisingly entertaining.

Peter Travers, ROLLING STONE:

“Haiku Tunnel” has nothing to do with Japan, poetry or even tunnels. It’s an office comedy that hits all the fun stops from giggles to guffaws. … Josh Kornbluth has adapted his stage monologue into a ragtag charmer that he co-directed with his brother Jacob and co-wrote with his brother and John Bellucci. Josh (think of a young Wallace Shawn) plays himself, an office temp who finds himself traumatized when he goes perm. Suddenly, the bosses, the secretaries, the copiers, the envelope moisteners, the bad lighting and the seventeen letters he forgets to mail all take on the menace of a Kafka nightmare. You will laugh.

J. Hoberman, THE VILLAGE VOICE:

It’s evident why [this movie] went over so well at Sundance. “Haiku Tunnel” is an indie inspirational. It’s unpretentiously low-tech and humorously offbeat. And against all odds, the filmmaker emerges as a star.

Jan Wahl, KRON-TV (San Francisco):

One of the most original movies I’ve seen in years! Funny, witty, terrific, clever — a great tale of the human comedy of errors. Really fun and wonderful. This is a really good film, different and unusual and wonderfully courageous. Four hats!

Jeffrey M. Anderson, SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER:

This movie didn’t just remind me of my own nightmare temp days from years ago, but it made me laugh uproariously. I’ve seen funny films this year, like “Rat Race” and “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,” but this is the first I’ve seen whose humor is true and comes from within. It’s a spectacular achievement and should not be missed.

Kevin Maynard, MR. SHOWBIZ:

We’ve seen a lot of movies (“Office Space,” “Clockwatchers”) attempt to capture the Kafka-esque banality that is corporate hell. But only “Haiku Tunnel” really thumbtacks it — from the unnerving hum of the fluorescent lighting to the dull, post-work patter. What’s more, it does so from a singular, office-minutiae-obsessed point of view. … This is satire on the giddy level of “The Simpsons” (a comparison made all the more evident by a snarky cameo from Harry Shearer as an orientation leader). … Anyone who’s ever filed, collated, or played Mixmaster DJ with the transcribing machine will find cathartic giggles in this breakout debut.

R.A. Bell, ORLANDO WEEKLY:

A latter-day Modern Times for the technological age! … In this insightful, class-conscious satire, Kornbluth is a delight in his cross between Buddha, Kafka and Dilbert. Anyone who has ever worked in clerical jobs — indeed, anyone who has ever worked any sort of mind-numbing job so prevalent in our service-based economy — will identify with and thoroughly enjoy this splendid comedy.

J. Lyle, AIN’T IT COOL NEWS:

The audience I was with loved every second of this film. Funnier than anything this summer. This is the kind of movie where you actually find yourself wishing that this was a character you knew in real life. … There is a warmth and innocence throughout that actually takes the viewer by surprise … which is a rare and welcome trait in any film. I urge everybody to seek this picture out, despite the bizarre title. You’ll find it well-worth the price of admission.

Steven Rosen, DENVER POST:

Some people, including me, are referring to the comedy “Haiku Tunnel” as the “Tao of Josh.” It stars heavy-set, funny-looking Josh Kornbluth as a neurotic romantic named Josh, who works (poorly) as a San Francisco legal secretary while trying to write a novel. Kornbluth, who co-wrote and co-directed “Haiku” with his brother Jacob, based the film on one of his performance monologues. Witty and original, with a sentimental but unflabby heart of gold. … I know it’s a curse to call nebbishy, confessional, funny guys like Kornbluth “the next Woody Allen,” but this has the spirit and zippy sight gags and one-liners of the Woodman’s early films.

On the “Red Diaper Baby” Monologue:

“Hilarious!” — New York Daily News

“Fresh, funny, smart and tender!” — Washington Post

“A treasure! You emerge from ‘Red Diaper Baby’ as you do from a finely wrought novel, reluctant to let go of characters who have come to feel like new friends.” — New York Newsday

On the “Red Diaper Baby” Book:

“These monologues have a performer’s personality even on the page. The read the way they play: with a delight in neurosis that turns it into intellectual slapstick.” — Pauline Kael

“Hysterically funny and absolutely fascinating…. Pithy, pure, and very funny stuff.” — Booklist

On “The Mathematics of Change”:

“Kornbluth is wonderful on childhood. … ‘The Mathematics of Change’ finds a comfortable balance between rollicking entertainment and pained self-examination.” — New York Times

“Josh Kornbluth ‘hits the wall’ as a freshman math student at Princeton. He makes a hilarious splat. … You may think it isn’t possible to laugh yourself silly at jokes about math. But you would be wrong.” — Washington Post

On “Ben Franklin: Unplugged”:

Kornbluth Breathes New Life into “Ben” – Pat Craig, Contra Costa Times, Thursday, October 21, 2004.
“Kornbluth has taken what was an entertaining monologue and turned it into a remarkable piece of theater that not only crackles with Kornbluth’s sharp and engaging humor, but creates a delightful emotional bond between him and his audience.”
“Those who have seen previous versions of the show will be surprised by this one, which is not only fleshed out, but is also some of the most sophisticated theatrical writing Kornbluth has done to date.”
“Through this wildly funny and quite touching tour, we meet Kornbluth’s mother and aunt, two old-school communists who gave the young man his political foundations. At first, he frets about how it would be possible for a young communist to represent the “First American” (as Franklin is frequently described) in any way. But through the power of some hilarious convolution, it turns out Ben and the commies may have a whole lot more in common than we ever dreamed.”
“In the end, it is Kornbluth who makes the show sing. He has a terrifically engaging stage personality, coupled with a writing style, occasionally reminiscent of some of Woody Allen’s early prose, that makes the evening a delight for anyone with a fondness for words or good theater.”

Ben is Back – Just at the Right Time – Robert Hurwitt, San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, November 2, 2004.
“The action dithers a bit early on but grows into an enchanting tale, divided between the story of Franklin and that of Kornbluth’s Josh as a lazy researcher getting drawn into the mystery of Franklin’s relationship with his son William. Arguments with his Stalinist mother feed into his quandary, as does a gig running around Manhattan dressed as Franklin for a series of MSNBC cable channel spots — which leads to a wonderful confrontation with a stunned right-wing militiaman in front of the United Nations.”
“The further Kornbluth gets into his subject, the more his mischievous wit reflects Franklin’s own. As I wrote when the piece first appeared, this ‘Ben’ is healthy, hilarious and wise.”
Read the full review.

Kornbluth’s Piercing, Gentle ‘Ben’ – Lloyd Rose, Washington Post, Thursday, May 11, 2000.
“Ben Franklin: Unplugged works on a lot of levels. Primarily its a detective story, as Kornbluth delves into the untold story of Franklin’s break with his loyalist son. It’s a revenge tale about Kornbluth getting his own back from a university that wouldn’t accept him as a student. It’s a show biz saga. Above all it’s a poignant and penetrating father-son saga that completes a trilogy that deserves to stand with the best of the Jewish father-son sagas in our theatre.”
Read the full review

Founding Fodder – Village Voice, January 13-19, 1999
“…because of William’s allegiance to the British (which included acts of loyalist terrorism), Ben permanently disowned him. Trying to understand the brutality of this rift is the heart of Josh Kornbluth’s immensely enjoyable new monologue, Ben Franklin: Unplugged (P.S. 122). It’s also a way for Kornbluth to examine the problematic relationship he has with his own parents: his unrepentantly Stalinist mother and, especially, his dead father.”
Read the full review

Kornbluth Evokes Spirit of Franklin – Robert Hurwitt, SF Examiner, Wednesday, May 27, 1998.
“JOSH KORNBLUTH looks like Benjamin Franklin. A lot. Especially with his long hair falling to his shoulders from his high, round, balding dome. Kornbluth looks even more like Franklin, as he demonstrates at the beginning of “Ben Franklin: Unplugged,” when he slides his round wire-rims down his nose and peers over them with widened eyes and arched brows. It’s a hilariously disarming, enchanting, and ingenious tale.”
Read the full review

On “Love & Taxes”:

Josh Kornbluth’s show offers the lighter side of ‘Love & Taxes’ – By Sasha Paulsen, Register Review Saturday, July 10, 2004.
” Richly witty and warmly ironic, Kornbluth’s story is probably one only he could tell, complete with his eye-rolling, hair-pulling antics; but it’s also everyman’s tale – the little guy in a maze of civilization, yearning inescapably for some of the benefits…”

Love and Taxes – By Marcus Crowder. The Sacramento Bee, Tuesday, April 26, 2005.
” He gives voice to numerous characters besides himself, but it’s more impersonation than inhabiting. We view them all through his generous but also satiric observations, which poke fun at everybody – especially himself. . . Kornbluth’s resourceful storytelling, masterful comic timing and peripatetic energy are undeniable.”
Read the full review

In Praise of Taxes – By Misha Berson, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Thursday, March 24, 2005.
“A sweet-faced, pear-shaped performer with the look of a young Zero Mostel and the comic imagination of a shrewd urban pixie….”
Read the full review

Taxing Problems Provide Inspiration for Solo Comedy – Marin Scope, Mill Valley Herald, Twin Cities Times, Ross Valley Reporter, San Rafael News Pointer, August 3 – August 9, 2004
“Josh Kornbluth is a father and a husband, but also an irreverent, outspoken observer of the chaotic and under-examined aspects of modernity. . . . He might not yet be a household name, but his popular Bay Area performances have him on the verge of fame.”

“One of the Year’s 10 Best!” (2003)
SF Chronicle and The Contra Costa Times.
A Crazed Comic Take Stock, Kisses His Assets Goodbye – Robert Hurwitt, SF Chronicle, Monday, June 30, 2003.
“Josh Kornbluth isn’t a loser but he plays one to hilarious effect… Developed by Kornbluth with Z Space founding Artistic Director David Dower, who staged the show, Love & Taxes is a dizzying maelstrom of tax problems that offers food for thought and a touching little love story as well.”
Read the full review

Love & Taxes – Jason Zinoman, New York Times Sunday, December 14, 2003.
“In previous autobiographical solo shows, Josh Kornbluth expressed anxieties about growing up with Communist parents (“Red Diaper Baby”) and flunking calculus at Princeton University (“The Mathematics of Change”). But the subject of his latest show, “Josh Kornbluth’s Love & Taxes,” which opened last week at the Bank Street Theater, inspires a more universal neurosis – the I.R.S. Mr. Kornbluth, who wrote the monologue with his director, David Dower, performs what could be described as a tax nightmare. After not paying the government for seven years, he amassed a $27,000 debt that ballooned to $80,000 because of penalties, interest payments and an expensive bill from a holistic tax attorney/therapist. This excerpt is taken from the beginning of the show, when Mr. Kornbluth describes his job at the time, working, ironically, for a tax attorney.”
Read the full review

Translating a Taxing Tale Into Masterful Monologue – June Bell, Forward Friday, November 21, 2003.
“A balding, middle-aged guy standing alone on a stage describing his financial troubles with two hefty volumes of the U.S. Tax Code as his only props doesn’t sound like a scintillating night at the theater. Yet Josh Kornbluth manages to weave his woes into an engrossing and humorous tale of redemption. Love & Taxes, Kornbluth’s one-man show based on his own experiences, chronicles how the erstwhile office temp fell in love while spiraling into a terrifying five-figure tax debt. Following its San Francisco premiere, “Love & Taxes” begins a run at New York City’s Bank Street Theater on December 4. ”
Read the full review

Kornbluth Returns with Comic Look at Love & Taxes – Andy Probst, American Theater Web, Tuesday, December 9, 2003
“A REMARKABLY FULL EVENING OF COMIC THEATER…It’s a rich comic brew that Kornbluth steeps with his unique brand of self-amusement and deprecation…Kornbluth’s rich writing is well-served by David Dower’s direction which gracefully moves the story forward to Kornbluth’s ultimate epiphany about and redemption from his tax problem.”

Pain in the Wallet, Arrow in the Heart – AOL Digital Cities, Tuesday, December 9, 2003.
“Anyone who has ever wrestled with the long arm of the Internal Revenue Service may find kinship — and a generous helping of laughter — in Josh Kornbluth’s newest work, ‘Love and Taxes.'”

The Taxman Cometh – Barbara & Scott Siegel – theatermania.com, Thursday, December 11, 2003.
“Having grown up as the son of a communist (see Red Diaper Baby), Kornbluth did not give the U.S. government much credence. Failing to file tax returns for seven years, he found himself in serious trouble. Kornbluth sets his love story amidst mounting interest and penalties, with a tax advisor grabbing his greatest asset: his art. Meanwhile, his girlfriend won’t marry him as long as the government is holding a sword over his financial head. And a clock begins to tick over all of this travail when Josh’s girlfriend gets pregnant. Kornbluth tells his story in a genial, self-mocking style. He’s a very likeable guy, which helps him when his script goes through a dry patch on its way to an oasis of laughter. Happily, he finds comic watering holes often…Above all, he is endearing and natural on stage. Kornbluth’s story is as funny as it is poignant, because not only must he face the taxman, he must also come to terms with his late father’s teachings. This show is by no means a taxing experience. ”

An Unlikely and Refreshing Delight – Kessa De Santis – Electronic Link, Wednesday, December 11, 2003.
“Whatever the intangibles of the IRS code and the fickle soul of love, they come together in both comic and realist splendor here.”

Steven Winn’s piece about Love & Taxes , in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, September 2, 2003.
Josh Kornbluth works a neat, mind-teasing little twist on the autobiographical monologue form in “Love & Taxes.”
Read the full review

Josh Kornbluth Grows Up: And That Even Means Paying his Taxes. – Lisa Drostova, East Bay Express, September 3-9, 2003.
“…Kornbluth allows audiences who go for intelligent comedy that blends hilarious self-examination with wry insight into the state of American politics, and tales of the vagaries of love between proudly neurotic people, to rejoice and throw off the chains of their mindless Hollywood oppression. The man who found a way to turn failing a Princeton math class and forgetting to mail 85 important letters for his lawyer boss into off-Broadway fame and a couple of independent films is back with his most polished and far-reaching work yet, the stunningly funny ‘Love and Taxes.'”
Read the full review

Accounted For : Josh Kornbluth Leaves Us Helpless with Laughter and Pleasantly Lost – Michael Scott Moore, San Francsico Weekly, July 9, 2003.
“…John Cheever wrote a self-deprecating introduction to his collected stories that reminds me of Kornbluth’s show. Storytellers tend to be open books, he argues; they can’t hide their flaws or their lack of sophistication. Kornbluth understands this contention and plays with it. He seems to agree with Cheever that any honest accounting of a writer’s early work “will be a naked history of one’s struggle to receive an education in economics and love.” In Kornbluth’s case, though, it’s also screamingly funny.”
Read the full review

Comic Gold- ‘Taxes’ makes the best of a bad situation – Pat Craig, Contra Costa Times, Monday, June 30, 2003.
“Love and Taxes” is a thoroughly engaging and satisfying evening of theater that gives this Bay Area treasure a chance to shine brightly…wonderful work that is not to be missed.”
Read the full review

Fiscal Farce: Left-wing Artist Creates Fiscal Farce of IRS Encounter – Karen D’Souza, SJ Mercury News, Wednesday, March 3, 2004.
“…it’s not everyone who can turn revenue rulings and amended filings into the stuff of laughter. So if you want to find out how Kornbluth gets out from under a crushing pile of debt while staying true to his revolutionary values, you’ll have to pull up a chair at this fiscal tour-de-force.”
Read the full review

Kornbluth’s Latest Monologue – Chad Jones, Oakland Tribune
“ALTHOUGH Josh Kornbluth’s enjoyable new monologue, “Love & Taxes,” is a comedy, parts of it are as scary as any horror movie. Ever the good-natured chatterbox, Kornbluth rambles on about his past and his family. Then he starts talking about taxes, and before you know it, your chest constricts, your breathing becomes shallow, your pulse races and a scream begins forming in the back of your throat. When Kornbluth reveals that he once owed more than $27,000 in income taxes, it’s all you can do to not run shrieking from San Francisco’s Magic Theatre. Perhaps no monster is more frightening than the Internal Revenue Service, and Kornbluth’s story demonstrates exactly why that’s true.”
Read the full review

‘Love & Taxes’ Through August 3rd: In The Red – Anna Mantzaris, special to SF Gate
April 15 is not a date most folks look forward to, unless they have stock in Turbotax. For a while, writer/performer Josh Kornbluth was the exception. After seven years of not filing his taxes, he relished his newfound position “in the system,” not to mention those juicy little refunds he was entitled to after signing on the dotted line. This was before things got out of hand with a tax attorney, Hollywood called and he met a striking woman who couldn’t make left-hand turns. Kornbluth, who adapted his popular performances at San Francisco’s the Marsh into the Sundance hit film “Haiku Tunnel” with his brother Jacob, tells his story of how he went from black to red with the IRS in a compelling monologue. Directed by collaborator David Dower for the Z Space Studio, Kornbluth’s performance doesn’t rely merely on its fierce humor, but delves deeper as he reflects on his Communist father, living the life of an artist, falling in love with a fellow neurotic and a friendship that changed his life. Kornbluth is beyond endearing and one of the hardest-working performers around — you definitely owe it to yourself to see this one.

Josh Kornbluth: A Natural Raconteur – Suzanne Weiss, Culture Vulture
“If Josh Kornbluth weren’t so darn funny you might weep. For those who have yet to see the popular Bay Area performer, close your eyes and imagine a seriously balding Jewish Spalding Gray. Now conjure up an image of a younger Woody Allen – only more neurotic, if such a thing is possible. Mix them together and you begin to get the picture…”
Read the full review

On “Citizen Josh”:

PAT CRAIG: ONE HAND CLAPPING

‘Citizen Josh’ remains a pleasure to behold
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched:08/23/2007 03:05:58 AM PDT

IN MY LINE of work, it’s nearly impossible to check back in on a show in the midst of its run, just to see how it’s doing. Usually you see it when it’s opening night and never again, unless it has a major cast change or runs for years. That’s why it was so much fun going to Berkeley Rep the other night to watch “Citizen Josh,” Josh Kornbluth’s latest solo piece. I’d seen the monologue about Josh’s venture into the world of participatory democracy — initially to get playground equipment for a neighborhood park his son enjoyed playing in — and was delighted how he could digress and meander to the point where the piece eventually included sitting next to Al Gore in a meeting, and using his acting skills to create a senior thesis only 27 years overdue. When “Citizen Josh” opened last May, I was knocked out by it and wrote about how it was (and still is, for that matter) some of Josh’s best work to date. And time has improved it wonderfully. Those who work with Josh often comment on how much the performer likes to tinker with his material, tweaking a word here or a line there, sometimes even late in a run, when he gets a notion something else will sound better. And since it’s his own piece, he can pretty much change things at will, since any mistakes, as well as the praise, will be on his head. Josh opened his show in San Francisco, friendly territory for the man who has become a Bay Area institution over the past decade or so. But that was on the other side of the Bay from his beloved Berkeley, and being back in the East Bay seemed to add about a thousand watts to the Kornbluth grin. He seemed genuinely pleased to be playing for a hometown crowd that knew, firsthand, about the local spots he mentioned in his 90-minute piece, which plays on Berkeley Rep’s Thrust Stage through Sept. 2. So if you get a chance, you really should see Josh play a home game, where he has friends in the audience, and more likely than not his young son backstage keeping him company. The show is a delight, a smart and pleasantly circuitous tale that takes the audience through his undergrad days at Princeton, the tense days following the birth of his extremely premature younger brother, Sam, and his relationship with his family and neighbors. It’s like spending an evening with an old friend who has a huge knack for telling a story. His Berkeley appearance is probably the beginning of a long tour of the new piece. His show is produced by Berkeley-based Jonathan Reinis, former operator of San Francisco’s Theatre on the Square and a Tony Award-winner who, among other things, introduced Dame Edna to both San Francisco and Broadway.

On “Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?”:

From the New York Times:

SAN FRANCISCO — The comedian Josh Kornbluth says he never really considered himself Jewish until he sifted through a series of hypercolored portraits and emerged, as he puts it, one of Warhol’s Jews.

In 1980 Andy Warhol created a series of silk-screen prints called “10 Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century” depicting luminaries like Einstein, Kafka and Golda Meir. Critics were appalled and denounced the series as crassly exploitative; audiences responded far more favorably.

Recently the art historian Richard Meyer, a professor at the University of Southern California, wrote an essay about the exhibition’s lost history: Warhol’s artistic process, the hundreds of Jews whom he considered including, Anne Frank and Bob Dylan among them, and the Jewish cultural centers that were happy to play host to the show. The Jewish Museum in New York and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco used Mr. Meyer’s essay as a springboard for a fresh exhibition of the portraits, which opened in Manhattan last spring and arrived here in October.

Then, Mr. Kornbluth walked through. He was having none of it.

“I defaced my catalog,” he said. “I put a Jewish beard and sidelocks and a yarmulke on him. I thought, if Warhol is going to Warholize the Jews, then I’m going to Jewify Warhol.”

Far from being dismayed, the museum here commissioned Mr. Kornbluth, well known in the San Francisco Bay Area for his irreverent monologues, to write one about his Warhol journey. Mr. Kornbluth, a son of atheist Marxists who grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, decided to investigate his unease with the exhibition by exploring its history, the subjects and their creator.

“I began to look at the War-whole,” he said. One result, “Andy Warhol: Good for the Jews?,” was staged at the museum over the past two weekends, and the final performance, sold out like the others, is on Thursday night.

In a way Mr. Kornbluth’s comic routine is an allegory for a museumgoer’s struggle to find meaning. Reject, then reconsider: curators say that process is critical to the museum experience. By presenting the monologue, they add, they are encouraging patrons to undergo a process similar to Mr. Kornbluth’s.

“Most of the time museums tell you, ‘This is a masterpiece, and if you can’t appreciate it, then it’s your failure,’ ” Mr. Meyer said. “It’s an experience we all have, when you go to an art exhibit, and the art doesn’t speak to you.”

He added, “We’re asking people not to give up on art that seems difficult or that they feel indifferent toward or that they think is meaningless.”

In the opening of his monologue Mr. Kornbluth protests, “I don’t get it.” He shakes his fists at the portraits, projected onto a row of screens behind him. “I don’t get the same feeling I get from the Rembrandt portraits at the Met. They’re resisting me, they’re pushing me away.”

He looks a bit closer. He studies the colors “potchkied” over the face of Louis Brandeis, the crude scribbles outlining Gertrude Stein’s features, the “blue eye shadow” layered over Golda Meir’s profile. Still, he says, “I get nothing.”

Critics of the 1980s exhibition found nothing to praise, either. But in his 2008 reconsideration of the portraits, Mr. Meyer emphasized that the show was received with enthusiasm outside New York. When Warhol visited Coral Gables, Fla., when the show opened there, nearly 1,000 people lined up for autographs.

In the monologue Mr. Kornbluth tries delving into the professional biographies of Warhol’s subjects in search of artistic substance: George Gershwin’s revolutionary mix of jazz, popular and classical music, the Marx Brothers’ films. Then he gets to the theologian and philosopher Martin Buber, “the one I know absolutely nothing about.”

Suddenly the comedian shifts to an anecdote about a gay Presbyterian minister named Chuck who gave the teenage Mr. Kornbluth a brief lesson on “I-It” and “I-Thou,” elements of Buber’s philosophy of human relationships.

“I-It” involves relating to a person as a functional object — “I objectify you,” as the Rev. Chuck put it; “I-Thou” involves relating to someone in a more engaged way. “When you feel ‘I-Thou,’ you connect to the eternal,” Mr. Kornbluth quotes Chuck as saying. “ ‘I-It’ is a monologue. ‘I-Thou’ is a dialogue.”

“That’s what I have to do with these portraits to get inside them,” Mr. Kornbluth tells the audience. “I need to get from ‘I-It’ to ‘I-Thou.’ ” He tries to create a dialogue between his own experience and that of the subjects, particularly on the wide-ranging iterations of Jewish identity.

The actress Sarah Bernhardt was born to a Jewish courtesan in Paris, but was baptized in a Roman Catholic church at 12 and educated in convents. Stein was an American who lived her adult life as a writer in France, where, historians suspect, she survived the Nazi occupation because of her connections to a Vichy figure. Kafka was born in Prague to a German Jewish family, and his attempts to relate to his conflicting heritage left him alienated, a theme that courses through his writing.

Mr. Kornbluth didn’t attend a synagogue and never had a bar mitzvah. His mother spoke Yiddish, but culturally his family members identified more as Americans than as Jews. His father rejected his Jewish faith and taught his children about Marx, Engels and class struggle.

Mr. Kornbluth began pondering the themes of rejection, marginalization and ideological struggle in his own life. “I’ve been doing a kind of Jewish 101 this last month,” he said. “I’d thought that because I’m not a religiously observant Jew, then I’m not a Jew.”

And there it was. He was relating to Warhol’s Jews. He had drawn himself into the art.

“Warhol was a door maker — that’s why there’s no depth,” Mr. Kornbluth said. “He put behind each door an icon, a superstar, so we’d want to go through. He created an ‘I-Wow.’ ”

And ultimately, Mr. Kornbluth said, the experience of thinking about the portraits gave him a greater appreciation of and curiosity about his Jewishness. The art validated him.

“What Andy Warhol has taught me is that I am a Jew,” Mr. Kornbluth concludes at the end of the show. For that, he says, he is in debt to the artist. “I guess you could say that I am a Warhol Jew,” he adds.