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"Incisive,
Insightful,
Interesting
and
Important.
Oh,
and
Funny.
Laugh
out
loud, ain't
that
the
truth,
stop
you're
killin'
me
FUNNY!"
-
Auburn
Citizen
Emmy® winning writer and Tonight Show comedian Mike Dugan's Men Fake Foreplay
is a hilarious and uplifting morality tale about the trials and errors encountered
along the road to becoming a man in a ‘boys will be boys’ world!
The Hit Relationship Show Hits the Road!
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Based on the book, "Men Fake Foreplay ... and Other Lies That Are True" by Mike Dugan - Rodale Press
Men Fake Foreplay
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"Fully Reassesses the Age Old Battle of the Sexes."
-
Syracuse City Eagle
and is rapidly picking up fans everywhere!
"I have had the deep pleasure of personally handing "Men Fake Foreplay" to
everyone from Norman Lear to Joan Collins, Marianne Williamson to Paula Abdul
~ in their homes mind you ~ I find it's so much better than a bottle of wine!!"
- Concord Recording Artist Jimmy Demers |
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Mike Dugan’s “Men Fake Foreplay” is anything but fake. It’s incisive, insightful, interesting and important. Oh, and funny. Laugh out-loud, ain’t that the truth, stop you’re killin’ me, funny.
Dugan is a gifted comic with an ax to grind. He’s not particularly happy about the way men, himself included, have been raised to behave towards women. He has some suggestions, and he’s based them on keen observations, which he shares with the audience so gently, so sardonically and with such irony, that the message sinks in before they have a chance to throw up defenses. In performance he is immensely personable and immediately likeable. One reason for his success at selling his message is that he so obviously believes in it. He really is convinced he can change the way society turns boys into men one audience at a time. And given the fact that he has three daughters, he has compelling reasons to strive for that goal.
No one is let off the hook here, least of all Dugan himself, but this is not an exercise in men bashing. It is a thoughtful, well reasoned, hysterically funny, occasionally profane and consistently entertaining treatise on what men do, why they do it, and what can be done to stop it. While this is technically closer to stand up comedy than theater, there are myriad characters and what they say illuminates not only their own psyche but the message of the piece as well. You hear a writer’s
voice in this show, with ideas and and themes and motifs winding like a Moebius strip throughout
the night.” - Tom Woods, Special to The Citizen, Auburn, New York |
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About midway through Dugan’s one man show”Men Fake Foreplay”, it becomes clear that the humor is mainly an enjoyable delivery system for an important message. The Emmy Award-winning writer and performer uses a keen sense of the comic to open up the topic of male sexual fantasy and where it collides with male sexual responsibility.
Illustrated with examples from Dugan’s own life and behavior, he forcefully notes that the emotional training that men receive is woefully inadequate to contend with women’s emotional needs, and the result is often pain on both sides of the equation.
Dugan takes us through his Catholic New Jersey background to his residency in Los Angeles, and hard as he is upon himself and his own difficulties in dealing with his emotions, he is much tougher with those who callously trade in the negative sexual stereotyping of women. One can glimpse the anger fueling his comedy as he sizes up contemporary musical figures who degrade women, as well as the corporate privateers who distribute such attitudes for profit.
Ultimately, Dugan’s call to a higher standard of behavior and a greater depth of concern for others, along with greater self-awareness, shines through the wealth of comic illustration. ‘Men Fake Foreplay is the rewarding experience of good advice wrapped in laughter. There are a good many men who might profit from the experience of taking Dugan’s message to heart; there are a good many women who deserve to be treated better, if Dugan’s message takes hold.
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 Syracuse, New York
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Fearing that
respect for the opposite sex—and the healthy
relationships that result from it—might be
easing itself into extinction, Dugan crafted
Men Fake Foreplay, a humorous look at the
forces that keep men and women together and
the cultural paradigms that have a nasty habit
of driving them apart ... Read
More ...
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"A candid, often sardonic, sometimes surprising, nearly always hilarious take on the battle of the sexes ...
thoughtful and probing ... Dugan is a terrific performer, smart, funny, insightful." |
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It's not easy
being a man these days. "We're in a world
that's designed to teach men to do the easy
thing, not the right thing," says comedian
Mike Dugan. "And the easy thing, and the
right thing, are rarely the same thing.
To me, a man has to learn how to overcome
adolescent impulses and appetites in a world
whose media culture is all about men continuing
to live in their appetites ..." Read
More . |
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Theater
4/13/2006
On
becoming the right man
by Rebecca Daniels
A "date night" excitement pervaded UPAC's theater in
Kingston last Saturday, April 8.
Typically dressed in jeans and leather
jackets, 20, 30 and 40-something
couples, many of them holding hands,
lined up to see Mike Dugan's one-man
show, Men Fake Foreplay. The Emmy
award-winning comedian met their
expectations. He had the large crowd
laughing from beginning to end of the
90-minute show, with occasional time
outs for some of his more sobering
observations on male/female
relationships and sexuality.
"Where
did I go wrong?" "What do women want?"
Until twelve years ago, 48-year-old
Dugan didn't have a clue. After a series
of painful breakups that started in
adolescence, his confusion and suffering
finally led him to a spiritual retreat
where he began to look at things
differently. One of the first lessons he
learned from his teacher was that human
beings are like heat-seeking missiles.
"We're designed to make mistakes and
correct ourselves," Dugan says early on.
"This show is about trying to find our
way back to the heat."
By
introducing his humorous yet pointed
commentary on men's shortcomings in this
way, Dugan immediately created space for
the men in the audience to identify with
his journey toward relationship
enlightenment instead of comparing or
becoming defensive. Standing before his
peers, in his gray shirt and beige
pants, Dugan was an ordinary, nice guy
in his 40s who'd been through it all. He
was safe, one of them; he even had love
handles named Ben and Jerry.
Citing
the thousands of relationship books
geared towards women and the scarcity of
those for the opposite sex, most of
Dugan's comments were about and directed
towards men. Nevertheless, he managed to
make the women in the audience feel
included. At times it felt as though we
were being made privy to male secrets,
which made it that much more
fascinating. For example, according to
Dugan, men really do discuss the details
of their sex lives with their friends.
And he unabashedly admitted that men
cheat. Not that they're the only ones.
"Women cheat to end the relationship
through catastrophic intervention,"
Dugan says. "Men cheat preemptively."
According to Dugan, men base their
sexual and relationship decisions on
fantasy - "a bad combination of
selective memory and euphoric recall."
They have a hard time committing to a
relationship because "they want to have
sex with every woman there is." Men have
been vacationing in a sexual fantasy
world their whole lives, says Dugan.
"We're afraid that as soon as we're in
the church, standing at the altar and
saying, 'I do,' a supermodel will run
into the vestibule screaming, 'Am I too
late?'"
He
gets serious when he talks about lying
to a woman he loved, telling her that he
hadn't cheated when he had,
acknowledging that he had interfered
with her sense of trust, both in him and
in her own intuition. When he finally
admitted his casual indiscretion to her
because the wall between them had grown
so thick, she told him that she couldn't
feel safe with him again. The pain of
that breakup kicked his ass into being
teachable, says Dugan. He started facing
his feelings for the first time and
having relationships with women that
were not about getting laid.
"Women
want men who like women," his
landlady/mentor/friend told him. This
observation launches Dugan into a
diatribe against the disrespect towards
women that has become so common in the
media. "Sex is becoming an escape from
intimacy," says Dugan. "Without a mature
set of feelings, I'm led by adolescent
impulses and appetites... Our feelings
are the guidance system that brings us
back to the heat." Ultimately, Dugan
says, what all of us - men and women -
want is to feel safe. Foreplay, when
it's real, is "the things we do to make
people feel safe." Dugan discovers that
he didn't have to figure out women in
order to be happy. "It was never about
finding the right woman. It was about
becoming the right man."
Dugan,
who lives in
Los Angeles, has been touring his stage
version of Men Fake Foreplay for
the past several years in the United
States and Europe. He is anticipating an
off-Broadway run of the show in the near
future. In the meantime, you can read
his book by the same title. For more
information, visit his Website at
www.menfakeforeplay.com. |
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I
first heard Mike Dugan at Jongleurs, a comedy club at
Camden Lock, North London. He came on late when half
the audience was ripped, sat down on a barstool and
started to talk. He looked like a nice guy, a distinct
disadvantage in that
part of London where nice guys
don’t finish last, they finish up toast. But Mike's
opening lines resonated with the audience: ‘I was
the youngest child in my family and by the time they
had got around to me it was pretty much ‘No heroin
in the living room’. ‘Michael, you’re not using
the good spoons, are you?’” That got a big laugh
and it soon became apparent that Mike Dugan had
something important to say on a subject that is
normally taboo in North London: relationships.
“I have one piece of advice for men,” he said and
every male was riveted. ‘If you break up with a
woman, you had better do it smoothly, or you will
never get another good one again. Women have an
intelligence network that rivals the CIA. They make
the Internet look like two tin cans with string
tied between them. I guarantee if you screw over a
woman tonight, by tomorrow morning you'll be on a
shit list in Afghanistan....” There followed a
wonderful half-hour of philosophizing on trust,
responsibility, intimacy, commitment, masculinity,
role models, lap dance clubs, marriage, cheating and
pornography, sprinkled with some snappy
one-liners, such as: “Sex between two people is
beautiful – provided you can get between the right
two people…” and “Women are basically
researchers. Especially in bed. That only looks like a
negligee: it's really a lab coat... ” At
the end
guys with bullet-heads and no ears were
looking mistily into the eyes of their girlfriends.
Now Mike Dugan has placed his philosophy between the
covers of a book, Men Fake Foreplay… And Other
Lies that are True.The
book
expands and develops his stage show in interesting and
thought-provoking
ways.
The
punchline is so wise it hurts: “I didn't have to
figure out women in order to be happy. It was
never
about finding the right woman. It was about
becoming the right man.” Men Fake Foreplay
isn’t a cynical, exploitative tome designed to make
women feel neurotic and vulnerable.
Rather, it celebrates “la difference”
and gives us all hope that maybe one day we’ll be
able to behave a little better towards the opposite
sex. I wish I’d read it when I was 16.
- Peter Thompson |
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