If America currently howls in psychic pain, broken and divided, suffering from various emotional, spiritual, political crises, hemorrhaging each day in existential agony from the soul-crushingly bleak, relentlessly interminable horror that is life during a pandemic and the failure of leadership to see us through it, let me submit to you that American comedy is also lost and in deep crisis. Without a collective audience to conjure the contagiousness of enjoyable, transmissible theatrical laughter, without instantaneous stand-up reaction and feedback loop to tell comedians what’s funny, without much direction or togetherness, humorists are left to their own insulated devices, their own peculiar observations, and their idiosyncratic penchant for what they find amusing. This could yield some impressive, eccentric results, but in the case of “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar”— something of an oddity gone horribly wrong— it’s almost the opposite. There’s a confidence, and courage of comedic conviction that’s admirable on the surface, it but borders on the wildly presumptuous in practice. And if we still don’t yet know the long-term effects of COVID-19 on the lungs and the body and the consequences that prolonged quarantine and isolation will have on the psyche—to tie our crisis together thematically— I would counter that we still don’t know the lasting impact ‘Barb and Star’ will have on the human brain.