Last night, I had dinner with my ex-boyfriend and his boyfriend. Then we all went to see a cabaret show called “Dearest Mommie.” I can think of at least one person reading this who will gripe about me not calling him on my brief swing through town, but he should feel lucky he did not have to sit through this experience. The two most interesting things about the show were the short film shown beforehand about gracious table manners (produced by the Canadian Film Board in the middle 1970s) and the fact that one of the players in “Dearest Mommie” once menaced someone I knew with a butter knife and slept with the wife of another friend of mine, breaking up their marriage. Throughout his performance, I kept looking for signs of mental unbalance, but since the entire show seemed as if it were staged by escaped mental patients, it was like looking for a hay in a haystack. Or a needle in a big pile of needles. Or a greedy and dishonest Republican.

Mommie Dearest is one of the funniest films ever made; it remains hilarious after all these years because it is so clearly unaware of its own camp value. “Dearest Mommie,” on the other hand, is nothing more than a cynical recycling of the movie’s most over-the-top moments. Joan Crawford (here, of course, a man in drag) becomes a lesbian dominatrix who wields her power in predictable ways over daughter Christina and assistant Carol Ann.

I don’t know. Am I just missing something? To me, the best camp is either innocent of its campiness or injects some sort of clever commentary in the mix. This is why Charles Busch’s work is so often uneven: he gets caught up in what he thinks would be funny as opposed to what would be clever. It is also why John Waters has been all over the map. But camp without wit is usually a one-trick pony, and you might as well not bother for more than a minute. Show us your outfits, do a line reading or two, and pack it in for the night so I can get to bed early.

I don’t think there is anything inherently funny about a man in a dress. Really, you gotta work it, girl.