Opening the Male

By Jerry Fink

Friday, July 31, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Calling his one-man show “The Male Intellect: An Oxymoron?” was risky for comedian Robert Dubac.

“The title seems to scare men away a little bit, just because they’re kind of tired of getting male-bashed,” Dubac says from his home in Telluride, Colo. “But then they come and realize it’s just an instrument to lure the women in so we can make fun of them.”

The comedy about relationships between men and women will be at the Suncoast Friday through Sunday.

The concept is similar to “Defending the Caveman,” the popular one-man show at the Excalibur starring stand-up comedian Kevin Burke.

“This is the show that you see after you see ‘Defending the Caveman,’ ” Dubac says. “The other show is like, ‘OK, I’m a caveman and this is why.’ My show is, ‘OK, let’s try to mature a little bit and grow up.’ ”

“Caveman” was created in 1991 by comedian Rob Becker, about the same time Dubac was creating “Oxymoron.”

“It kind of evolved out of my stand-up act,” says Dubac, who once did a Carrot Top-like comedy magic routine. “I found doing stand-up was pretty limiting. It was very creative in the beginning — Shecky Green, Don Rickles, all those guys doing lounges. They were real creative, doing characters, going off and goofing on things. That’s kind of the way I was when I started. But then it got pretty structured, everyone was just doing stand-up jokes. You couldn’t get very theatrical. This was about 15 years ago. I said, ‘There are so many of us doing the same thing, let’s try to do something different.’ ”

He searched for a universal topic, something everybody could identify with. It was the early ’90s when “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” was huge.

“Everybody was trying to figure out the relationship between the sexes,” Dubac says.

“Oxymoron” was born.

“The stage represents the inside of a guy’s brain — the left and the right hemisphere,” Dubac says. “The left side is the masculine side. The right side is the feminine side. So the left side is full of empty beer bottles and bad furniture and the right side is empty.

“Most of us don’t listen to our feminine side because we think it makes us gay, but it only makes us gay enough to use coasters.”

In “Caveman” the star portrays one character. In “Oxymoron,” Dubac plays several.

“When the main character wanders over to left side of the brain, I become one of these characters, so it’s much more theatrical — it’s not just one long monologue. It’s a bunch of monologues by different characters so it gives a lot more of a theatrical experience and has a little more of an impact.”

After “Oxymoron,” Dubac added two more one-man shows to his repertoire — the sequels “The Male Intellect: The 2nd Coming” and “The Male Intellect: Piss and Moan.”