Review: John Leguizamo Goes for Easy Laughs in ‘Latin History’
Jesse GreenNovember 15, 2017:
Like the best mimics, John Leguizamo administers large but precisely calibrated doses of exaggeration to make his impersonations pop. In “Latin History for Morons,” a panoptic survey of two millenniums of oppression in the Americas, he tosses off dozens of quick character sketches that feel exactly as true as they are likely inaccurate.
I rather doubt, for instance, that his prissy, nail-filing Moctezuma has any basis in fact. But who cares whether the Aztec emperor really lisped at Cortés, “You leave me no choice ’cause you’re so butch”? What matters is that the laughs are real, in this case suggesting familiarity with the accommodations that proud people make to an overwhelming force.
And so it is with almost every character brought to life in Mr. Leguizamo’s long and often hilarious parade of injustice, stretching from Peru under the Inca to Texas under Trump. At their best, his jokes get at something deep, whether he is serving up a Rat Pack Christopher Columbus, a French poodle de Tocqueville, a sassy, cross-dressing Cuban-American Civil War soldier or a deaf uncle with an idiosyncratic way of signing.
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