ISOBOBS.

Fish sticks. Time magazine. Ivy League football. Leno. There's a certain kind of mediocrity that isn't even impressive as mediocrity. The emperor who has no clothes isn't naked, he's wearing Fruit of the Loom white cotton briefs. This is ISOBOBS's territory.

ISOBOBS is actually a double-headed beast: ISO, a third-generation Pilobolian dance troupe, and the Bobs, an a capelia quartet specializing in the kind of post-collegiate wit that reminds you that a lot of people spent their college years watching TV. I'm not just talking about quality, but also about sensibility and range of reference. The company's look is less urban chic than urban-chic brand, urban chic as tamed and neutered for sitcoms and jeans commercials. The music is doo-wop being funny by cross-breeding itself with various pop styles (David Byrne, the Beatles) and by bouncing off of its polished, dead-pan surface lyrics that satirize contemporary life.

But the satiric riffs are ones that ran out of gas about five minutes after "Saturday Night Live" first did them fifteen years ago. We get horny priests, rockin' Hare Krishnas, and post-coital cigarettes. What we mainly get, you'll have noticed, is sex interest, but always low-level, male heterosexual sex interest: doe-eyed women, half-naked women, women just standing around while the men act cool. Number after number is unbearably slick, jokey, insular, and smug.

And while the Bobs' music, energetic and tight, does have technical merit, ISO's dancing isn't even remotely up to professional standards of choreography or performance. Gymnastic strength and grace, illusionism, mystery--none of the qualities of Pilobolus and its better imitators were in evidence. Pas de deux that I first thought parodic turned out to be merely clumsy. I can only imagine that an audience that comes for the music, which predominates, either won't know the difference or won't much care.

The second half of the program was given over to 29.95: A Mall Odyssey, a new work with many sections that cluster loosely around its titular theme. That theme strikes me as an apt one for ISOBOBS, for the company's material is so much like a mall itself: bland, homogenous, climate controlled, covered over, and turned in on itself. We have to be careful about this stuff. Malls have already colonized our countryside; let's not let them colonize our brains. And let's hope that the Joyce doesn't let them colonize its season again, either.