Mario's puppet Cabinet: the sparkle drains

Irony works only at a distance, and here it dies the moment the distance closes. Mario's puppet film — Motown-girl puppets "decked out for climactic camp… in wicked three-piecers with slicked-back-straight hair and enormous robber-baron steer-horn mustaches" — is camp, but Mario's camp is the sincere kids'-show frame carrying genuinely dark history (Reconfiguration, mass displacement, Gentle's "find somebody outside the borders of our community selves to blame"). As the parody grinds from safely-historical toward the actual O.N.A.N. world the E.T.A. kids live in, that "festive sparkle" drains out of the room — the ironic distance that made the show fun fails exactly when the puppets start staging the audience's own present. The single-entendre maker (Mario) can't do ironic distance; his camp is earnest re-staging, and it's the earnestness that eventually stops the laughter. (Cf. 081's gala, the same camp-carrying-dark-history structure.)