Jeff Kosloski, with a in festive Christmas yarmulke, and Jane Shirley in "Santa's Big Red Sack."

The sixth edition of Avenue Theater's "Santa's Big Red Sack" is bursting with merriment, much of it directed at seasonal excesses including chirpy, well-meaning folks, passive-aggressive bell-ringers and PG-13 jokes.

* * * comedy

The improv-style show is a series of sketches escorted by Christmas music (real carols, not parodies). The four cast members set the tone before the show by forcefully distributing Hershey's Kisses and spray-cheese on crackers.

Two uber-cheery carolers break into "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," thoughtfully providing the cold with jackets and scarves, feeding the hungry, then helping an awkward stoner light his pipe, and kindly handing a mugger the handbag he's dropped.

"Merry Hanukkah" continues that earnest theme as a Christian couple, wearing lookalike argyle sweaters, visits a bewildered Jewish neighbor. They warble a Hanukkah tune and proudly offer a festive Hanukkah ladle and handmade green-and-red yarmulke that definitely would turn heads at temple.

The jaunty smugness continues with an increasingly frustrated father reading "The Night Before Christmas" to children whose questions reinterpret the phrase "threw up the sash" and snigger at "breast of newfallen snow." Then come a cannabis-inspired rearrangement of "Carol of the Bells" and an innovative Spanish-to-English translation of the word "Christmas."

And the cast throws in a repeating white-elephant joke based on Sarah MacLachlan's tear-jerking commercials for the American Humane Society, finding new, seasonally relevant causes to champion. (Is there anything sadder than a mall Santa surprised by his own rapidly cooling soaked lap?)

The show continues through Sunday, comic relief from more earnest productions. If you go, wear a Christmas sweater ironic or not and you might get a stocking stuffer-size reward.

Claire Martin: 303-954-1477, cmartin@denverpost.com or twitter.com/byclairemartin

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Review: Avenue Theater's "Santa's Big Red Sack" is back