All the Great Books

[CortJstr]

This is a repost from Dumbrella, but I thought some people here might be interested:

Over the weekend I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company: All the Great Books (Abridged) and it was awesome. I don't know how many stops are left on the tour but if you reading this forum then you desperately need to see this show.

The whole thing is set up so that the audience is in a summer remedial English class taught by the Coach, drama teacher (Professor), and student teacher (Matt) and there's some audience interaction. Especially if somebody leaves their phone on or brings candy into the "auditorium" and doesn't have enough for everybody.

Sylabus:
1984
The Aeneid
Alice in Wonderland
Animal Farm
Anna Karenina
Beowulf
Bridges of Madison County
The Brothers Karamazov
Call of the Wild
The Canterbury Tales
Catcher in the Rye
A Christmas Carol
The Color Purple
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Das Capital
David Copperfield
Death in Venice
Dianetics
Diary of Anne Frank
The Divine Comedy
Don Quixote
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Dracula
Fathers and Sons
The Feminine Mystique
For Whom The Bell Tolls
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
The Grapes of Wrath
Great Expectations
The Great Gatsby
Green Eggs and Ham
Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer's Stone
Heart of Darkness
Hound of the Baskervilles
Huckleberry Finn
Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Idiot
The Iliad
Interpretation of Dreams
The Invisible Man
Little Women
Lolita
Lord of the Flies
Metamorphosis
Middlemarch
Moby Dick
The Odyssey
Of Mice and Men
Oliver Twist
On The Road
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
The Origin of Species
Orlando
Paradise Lost
The Pearl
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Plato's Republic
Pride and Prejudice
Red Badge of Courage
Remembrance of Things Past
Roots
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Separate Peace
Silas Marner
Silent Spring
Sons and Lovers
The Sound and the Fury
The Story of Genji
A Tale of Two Cities
Tao Te Ching
The Three Musketeers
Thus Spake Zarathustra
To Kill A Mockingbird
To The Lighthouse
Ulysses
Valley of the Dolls
Walden
War and Peace

[jough]

They feature short bits from these guys on PBS from time to time really late at night (that I watch while the plot, such as it is, progresses on whatever soft-core late night on Skinomax movie I happened to be watching for its Proustian subtext that night) and I have to concur that these guys are really really funny.

They're like a literate Monty Python.  Only funny.

[AugustWest]

There are some really interesting choices in that list, to wit:

The Bridges of Madison County
Dianetics
Valley of the Dolls

Of course, I have quarrel with including Green Eggs and Ham, the book that introduced me to reading.

[CortJstr]

There are some really interesting choices in that list, to wit:

The Bridges of Madison County
Dianetics
Valley of the Dolls

Of course, I have quarrel with including Green Eggs and Ham, the book that introduced me to reading.

The first two are included just because they make cheap jokes about them. I don't actually recall them referencing Valley of the Dolls but I've never read it so I would've missed a subtle one and at one point they were making topical jokes and got so far off script that they had to skip a bit.

What's funny is that the Prof. and Coach wrote/directed it, and they were the ones who kept taking if farther off while Matt desperately tried to claw his way back to the show.