Please welcome to the Improv stage, you’ve see them on HBO and at your marriage therapist's office. He's the comedian you love to hate, sounds like Gestapo, inamorato, and avocado, the man who is never incommunicado, and she's the woman eager to feel ya, please welcome— Iago and his partner Emilia!

This skit is based on exchanges Iago has with his wife, Emilia, or with Othello's wife, Desdemona, in Acts 2 and 3. All of the “jokes” center on infidelity. The language here can be difficult, so I will walk you through some of it: Iago says that his wife is overly common— that she is a slutty expert with men's “thing[s] “ (obsolete slang for penis). Iago is not here suggesting that Emilia is giving him a penis (“I have thing for you”), when he responds that it must be a “common thing,” but, rather, that his wife has been stuffed by men so commonly that she’s, as a consequence, tainted and corrupted, lacking all nobility, virtue, and self- restraint. The acrimony and misogyny in the jokes that follow are clear enough, and modern enough: Iago's shtick is not much different than, say, that old Woody Allen chestnut: “My psychiatrist asked me if I thought sex was dirty; I said, ‘Only if it's done right.’ “ Still worse are the routines of other comedians, for example, the unprintably misogynist humor of Andrew Dice Clay: “She's a horny little animal. Look at her with her big t*ts.” This sort of “humor” doesn't ask that we see the world as filled with the wondrous or the funny. These are off- ramps to the vicious, mean, and cynical; cul de sacs of scurrility.