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“The closer you get the funnier we seem,” urged the guy on the portable stage tucked into the northeast corner of Willard Park. He beckoned the crowd nearer, smiling. It scooted up with tarps and blankets and coolers so late arrivals could fit in. A bluegrass band enlivened the mellow afternoon air while someone passed out “No War” bumper stickers and vendors sold cookies and drinks. 

It was time for political satire, and where better for political satire than a grassy sward in Berkeley? 

The occasion was one of San Francisco Mime Troupe’s free shows that crop up all over the Bay Area this time of year. In the words of one of its collective, Amos Glick: “We’ve been doing political theater for over 40 years for anyone who will listen.” 

Plenty were listening at Willard Park last Sunday. The name of the troupe’s latest jibe at politics-as-usual is “Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan,” based on the Frank Capra film, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” in which a naïve, goodhearted Jefferson Smith played by James Stewart joins congress only to discover that (gasp!) politics is corrupt. 

The movie is almost as naïve as Smith, but it provides a useful springboard for the Mime Troupe’s sendup, in which naïve, goodhearted New York firefighter Jefferson Smith is co-opted by the state department to observe the presidential elections in the mythical but emblematic middle eastern country of Obscuristan. No surprise that the United States just wants to use Smith. Obscuristan’s shoo-in candidate is in its pocket, and though it claims that the country is so worthless that it is “forced to import sand,” when it turns out to have oil the state department only shrugs. 

“Who knew?” a spokeswoman coos, batting her eyes. 

“Mr. Smith Goes to Obscuristan,” generates laughs and has a few good lines. For example, when a repressor groans, “Have you seen what happens when you give free speech to well-fed children? It isn’t pretty.” But its satire of U.S. foreign policy and the Bush administration is neither inventive nor biting. More akin to “Saturday Night Live” than to Bertolt Brecht or Dario Fo, it features a Dick Cheney who once worked for “Scandalburton,” and a President Bush who chokes on pretzels, cannot pronounce new words, and fusses, “This peace process is taking longer than a colonoscopy.” The Obscuristan candidate Automaht Regurgitov, declares, “If you know which way the wind blows, you know which way to bend,” and his upstart opposition aspirant is named Ralif Nadir. The news media gets ambushed too. CNN becomes SNN, the Selective News Network, which insists that its on-site reporter remember “nothing but puff pieces.” 

Written by Josh Kornbluth, Gene Sullivan and the Mime Troupe, and directed by Sullivan and Keiko Shimato, “Obscuristan” takes easy shots at sitting-duck targets but is likable. And though its cast members have variable talents, they all go at the material with infectious good humor. 

Oddly, the greatest irony of this particular performance may have occurred on its fringes, where demonstrators waved placards accusing the Mime Troupe of being “Racist and Orientalist.” Protesters protesting protesters? Its most unsettling moment may have come from the audience. When an Obscuristan patriot cried to the United States, “Everybody hates you,” several people cheered, while I flinched at those cheers. Has national self-loathing gone so far?