The result is a fast-moving and deeply funny farrago, a neo-vaudevillian sendup that manages to be both merciless and affectionate as it parodies not just the stentorian gasbags who favor us with their televised sports commentary, but also the athletes who are the objects of their, um, insights.
Nor does “Sports’’ spare the kind of get-a-life fans who (to choose an example at random) might waste their brain cells watching ESPN at night when they really ought to be reading Jonathan Franzen’s new novel.
“Sports’’ is performed by a versatile, limber, and indefatigable cast of three performers: Matt Rippy, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichenor, the latter two of whom co-wrote “Sports’’ and share directing duties. All three are savvy enough to know that they only have to tweak the reality of the sports-media complex a couple of degrees to find the humor, because there is so much in our obsession with games and the people who play them that is intrinsically comical once you stop to think about it.
Not that the helter-skelter pace of “Sports’’ gives you much time to think about it. The premise is that three sportscasters are attempting to cover the entire recorded history of sports in under two hours. They are attired for this challenge in “Monday Night Football’’-style gray blazers, shorts, knee pads, and sneakers. Rippy, the clean-cut, all-American boy type — he describes his role on the broadcast team as “the telegenic eye candy who will just stand here and look pretty’’ — wears a Patriots jersey with Tom Brady’s No. 12. Martin, who has a smooth dome and the rubber face of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus clown he used to be, wears a Red Sox jersey under his jacket.
Tichenor, who refuses to switch from his booming “game voice,’’ even during normal conversation, has the habit — problematic for a sportscaster — of collapsing in a dead faint when anyone says the word “baseball.’’ Why? Because, he insists, baseball is so boring. His proof? That a no-hitter is considered the ultimate baseball feat. “The most exciting thing that can happen is when nothing happens,’’ Tichenor points out, with so-there logic.
