Actor, writer, and composer Mark Nutter left town over a decade ago, but now he’s back with Le Comedie du Bicyclette, a musical parody that displays his gift for smart silliness. “This show is basically ‘room stuff,’” says Nutter, whose credits include writing for Saturday Night Live, 3rd Rock From the Sun, and the Chris Farley films Black Sheep and Almost Heroes. “When you’re working on a sitcom staff–‘and then the funny neighbor comes in, joke joke joke’–‘room stuff’ is what you get when you take a break from your regular writing and amuse yourself with the most disgusting and ridiculous ideas you can come up with.”
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Le Comedie du Bicyclette is also a vehicle for Nutter’s oddball yet sophisticated songwriting. Like Tom Lehrer, he’s a master of musical pastiche who can knock off a convincing melody in most any style and then outfit it with wickedly witty lyrics. A jive jazz novelty number, “White Guys,” pays homage to bandleader Louis Jordan as it tells of two suburban palefaces who crash an inner-city fish fry and earn the partyers’ enmity by lecturing against eating fried food. (One couplet rhymes “nasty fish” with “angioplasty fish.”) The operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan inspired a patter song about an “Unremarkable Man” who turns out to be a creepy perv: “In China babies do accrue / So I adopted one or two,” the smug patriarch declares, but later he admits, “I don’t approve of watching women have sex with animals / Unless it’s done in a way that doesn’t exploit the animal.” The chorus responds, “He’s a creepy, most remarkable man.” A lilting lullaby advises its infant listener that there’s no God, “love” is only lust, and your pets would just as soon eat you. And a send-up of A Chorus Line features Lewman (a veteran of Chicago dinner theater) singing a Broadway-style show tune to persuade his tormentors that “I’m in a Musical, but I’m Hetero”: “I eat all that manly stuff up with a spoon / Like broads and booze / When you look at me, don’t think of Tommy Tune / Think Tom Cruise / (Wait, bad example).”
Home was the Haven Motel, which the Nutter family owned. “My mom made up the beds, and my dad would charge rates based on the look of the customer.” The Haven began as a family-oriented accommodation. “But–like with the Bates Motel–when a new highway was built the traffic moved elsewhere. So my father was forced to start renting out at hot-sheet rates. When I was growing up my folks would tell me that the people who came in for an hour were driving cross-country and checked in to take a nap.”
Nutter bounced around writing scripts while his wife worked her way up to executive producer of 3rd Rock From the Sun. Among the sitcom’s staff writers were Wild Men! costars Liss and Lewman. Then 3rd Rock went off the air, the economy went south, and reality TV started making writers irrelevant. The guys found themselves with time on their hands–and voila! The Bicycle Men.
