Stand-up Neil

It’s clear that Neil Labute is talented. It’s clear that he is successful. It’s clear that he is twisted. It’s even clear that he is funny, in a dark, bent sort of way.

But it’s hard to see the former resident of Liberty Lake as a stand-up comedian. Yet that’s what he was Monday night following the screening of his film “ The Shape of Things .”

A film that lives up to the standards of the bizarre created by such works as “Your Friends and Neighbors” and “In the Company of Men,” “ The Shape of Things ” is a blackly comic look, and a larger meditation on, what men and women do to each other all for the sake of their relationship.

When a woman asks what he thinks the movie means, the standard undergraduate question, he says “It’s so easy to flip that back at you it’s almost a crime not to” before giving an honest answer. In the process of explaining, LaBute, a graduate of Brigham Young University, uses the word parable — “Being back in Utah, I use the word parable,” he says.

And when someone asks him what the play looked like onstage, he takes a beat, refers to the open stage behind him, and asks, “Do you want us to do it right now?”

OK, so maybe you had to be there. But he ended up earning more laughs than a month of Sunday comic strips.