Irwin's admirers should fall all over themselves to catch this endearing Everyman clown as he climbs out of his battered stage trunk and blinks at how the world has changed while he was napping. "I can't thank you enough for bringing this technology into my life," he says to his po-faced straight man Doug Skinner, at the end of the evening. By then, the baggy-pants clown has mastered the gadgetry, acquired the software, and established his own Web site to the point where he's so plugged-in to the virtual world he can't be bothered doing actual performances in the real world. For a mothballed artist who woke up that morning clutching a copy of "Social Security and You," that's pretty funny, in a bittersweet way.

"In the Same Regard" makes no pretenses to the brilliance of "The Regard of Flight," which spoofs (at the same time that it practices) the revolutionary theories of comedy that galvanized the avant garde theater of two decades past. But in its modest way -- "modest" meaning that we wish it were longer -- the new piece is a delicious riposte to the braying Critic of the earlier work (Michael O'Connor, so loathsome a know-it-all that only another critic could love him) who returns to badger the clown for stealing his material from Chaplin and not keeping up with modern times.

Now, as then, nobody gives the classic clown any respect. Skinner, a relentless taskmaster who sat at the piano in the first "Regard" pressing warning buzzers to focus the artist's attention, returns here with his nasty little puppet, Eddie, who is so critical he could make Julia Roberts feel like a hag. Ignoring Skinner's directive to "try to be nice," Eddie goes right for the carotid when he informs Irwin that, "This isn't like the earlier part of the show. That part was fast and exciting. This is kind of slow and ..." "Contemplative?" Irwin suggests. But Eddie is having none of it. "Is that because you're older and closer to death?" he wants to know.