Colin Quinn's 'Long Story Short' is Much More Than Just Colin Quinn
Today was not Colin Quinn’s first time in the Fox News building. “I was on Bill O’Reilly once,” he told Imus. “Not on Bill, but the show.” So, how did it go? “It went fine,” he said, smirking. “He’s stark-raving mad.”
Quinn, a comedian known for his gravelly voice and work on Saturday Night Live, is starring in a one-man show on Broadway called Long Story Short, directed and produced by Jerry Seinfeld and running through January 9th at the Helen Hayes Theatre.
Musing about how great the show must be, Imus hypothetically wondered who in their right mind would not go see “Long Story Short.”
“Well, I haven’t seen you there,” Quinn said. “That’s one person.”
Quinn lamented that to hear him explain the show’s premise, it sounds awfully boring. “I started playing it out in Bellmore and Levittown,” he said, naming towns on Long Island. “That’s Rob Bartlett’s territory. I just walked in and usurped Bartlett.”
The show centers on the fall of empires, namely the United States. “Everybody keeps doing the same thing, even after it stops working,” Quinn said. “The Greeks kept thinking, even after thinking stopped working. The Romans kept building, even after building stopped working. We do the same things—we try to think our way out of an economic crisis, and that doesn’t work, and we try to build housing.”
He believes everything is correlated to America’s empire decline, which he called “the Costco of empire declines,” because it will combine all declines together to produce the worst and greatest decline of all time.
Quinn and Seinfeld are close friends, so when the show gained traction Quinn convinced his more successful pal to sign on. “Everybody thinks he’s funny,” Quinn said of Seinfeld. “Me, I’m an acquired taste, like fine wine.”
A few years ago, Quinn hosted a short-lived talk show on Comedy Central called “Tough Crowd,” the quick demise of which he explained by saying to Imus, “You know how it is. You can’t be too politically incorrect these days.”
Then he invoked the words of the great comic sage George Carlin. “Before he died, he said he never thought the censorship would be coming from the left,” Quinn said. “And that’s what’s happening in show business.”
Quinn was married once, briefly, and compared the union to Wikileaks, in that it was a self-made disaster. Then, riffing on the recent document dumping scandal, he said, “I like the fact that the guy in Yemen goes, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll say we bombed them, even though you’ll really bomb them,’” he said. “The one thing Al-Qaeda doesn’t want is for us to bomb them. Anybody else can bomb them and it doesn’t bother them.”
He continued, “It’s like the guy who, when his girlfriend breaks up with him, he’s like, ‘You can sleep with anyone except that one guy.’ That’s how the Arab world feels about America.”
Go see Quinn in Long Story Short, every night of the week except Sunday, now through January 9th, if for no other reason than it’ll really tick off Rob and Tony.
-Julie Kanfer
Colin Quinn 
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