Orlando Fringe 2025 review: ‘Adventures in Baby-Hitting’

Stand-up comedy is hard; performing stand-up comedy about disabled children is harder still … and performing stand-up comedy about disabled children to an audience consisting of two critics and a room full of empty seats must be freaking impossible. So I have to applaud Joshua Ritter for pushing through the press preview of Adventures in Baby-Hitting, his macabre monologue about the travails of parenting identical twins with extreme special needs. Ritter’s sons were born with an alphabet soup of expensive syndromes — ASD, ADHD, OCD, ODD, CP, etc. — which has granted him a front-row view of what caregiving in America really looks like: forms, phone calls and endless bureaucracy.

Fighting the state of Florida for lifesaving social services makes for compelling content and incites righteous anger, but Ritter doesn’t appear to get nearly as animated about his boys’ achievements (like finally learning to walk) as he does about an opportunity to repeatedly have his nutsack grabbed by Matthew McConaughey. His namedropping showbiz anecdotes about his career as a supporting actor in things I’ve never seen peak with Snoop Dogg not getting him stoned. And although he draws amusing parallels between parenting and film production, jokes about how actors on film sets are treated like toddlers stand in sharp contrast to the care his own toddlers require.

I’m not sure if Ritter just doesn’t realize that repeatedly reminding us how much he’s sacrificed for his kids is not an appealing angle, or if he’s intentionally alienating his audience. I pride myself on having a perverse sense of humor, but Ritter’s approach to his material made me too uncomfortable for much laughter. Even if you are on his dark wavelength, he’s not the most visually dynamic solo performer, as director Mayra David mostly has him standing still behind a mic, and the pacing sticks to the same level of intensity, lacking the peaks and valleys that would give the ending more emotional payoff. Ritter’s unconditional love of performing comes through loud and clear; I’d feel less uneasy if he also expressed a little more empathy for his family.

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This article appears in May 14-20, 2025.