’50 Shades’ spoof isn’t the movie, which is why it’s fun

When it comes to porn, a turn-on can turn into a giggle with whiplash speed. Perhaps the secret to "Fifty Shades of Grey" is that it lets each reader decide what's hot and what's just silly. Still, comedians are always happy to help.

A touring comedy called "50 Shades! The Parody" settled into Bally's about this time last year, when the oh-so-serious "Fifty Shades" movie opened. The spoof closed in November but returned with a new producer in time for last weekend's Marlon Wayans movie spoof "Fifty Shades of Black."

Both of them make slapstick work of the neckties and gadgets used in the novel's offbeat coupling. In the red-band trailer for "Black," Wayans gets kicked across the room after applying an ice cube to his lady love. In "50 Shades!," there's a Monty Python-goes-Broadway chorus line saluting bondage and other painful sexual things you can do with your fingers and fists.

Be it with cheap raunch or slightly smarter raunch, "50 Shades!" may have held on long enough for people to realize the book's true purpose is to amuse us. The shameless little cabaret spoof may be the most inclusive thing to emerge from the "Fifty Shades" phenomenon, and it brings something different to the tourist corridor.

In fact, Year 1's biggest challenge was to reach theater, improv and "Saturday Night Live" fans and convince them they don't have to care much about the hapless best-seller to enjoy it. "I am about to reveal my dark side ... through song!" announces this Christian Grey (Paul Mattingly), as he casts away his "Phantom" half mask.

Last year, said song was a unique experience on the Strip: Christian making a showstopper of his signature phrase, "I Don't Make Love ... ," with evangelical belting about what he does instead — to people at the Flamingo playing bingo, or even your gramma in Alabama. This year, the Strip will soon have the new "Twisted Vegas" and "Spoofical," so maybe the rising tide of not so clearly separating our Cirque from our stand-up will carry all boats.

An almost all-new cast results from the show closing just long enough for the first troupe to scatter (before Windows Showroom proprietors Ken and Helene Walker rescued the title as hands-on producers). But the year's experience still shows on the technical side, where the cast doesn't seem quite so hamstrung by recorded backing tracks as it did in the early days.

New leads Mattingly and Maren Wade don't have the singing voices of their predecessors, so they go more Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman as insipidly wide-eyed Anastasia and smug, dominating billionaire Christian.

Last year's Anastasia sang her pining "There's a Hole Inside of Me" as a deadpan Broadway ballad, letting the audience figure it out. Wade punches the double entendres, and the direct route may be the best way to reach audiences who scored tickets at the half-price joint and didn't come for a layered musical-theater spoof.

There are still layers to the humor; improv comics tend to be a smart bunch. Here the subtext comes from a framing trio of frustrated book-club housewives (Christine Hudmar, Adriana Lomysh and Sabrina Sia, the lone holdover from last year's cast, as a sad-sack divorcee).

The book club ladies do "Fifty Shades" author E.L. James a solid when they ultimately decide erotica, in whatever ridiculous form it may take, is a good thing if it frees your imagination and gets you out of your rut.

A dose of this show's campy joy surely would have perked up the dour "Fifty Shades" movie, which felt obligated to make sense of an incoherent plot and somehow make the characters real. How jealous the movie's Jose would be to see Philip Drennen's fleet-flooted Latin lothario, or movie sidekick Catherine to see Lomysh's perpetually tipsy (or hungover) version.

Fun. What a concept. Beats whips and handcuffs any old day.

— Read more from Mike Weatherford at reviewjournal.com. Contact him at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com and follow @Mikeweatherford on Twitter.