I prefer to call it aplomb. And when three actors have it, they can get away with anything.

Whatever you call it, it's there in force in The Complete History of America (abridged), the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival's extravagantly ridiculous comedy, which purports to tell the entire story of this nation in less than two hours and which three lesser mortals would never be able to pull off.

Luckily, the Shakespeare festival has given us Philip Nolen, Tom Taylor and Richard B. Watson. And they have aplomb -- big-time.

This wild little comedy doesn't present quite as fertile a ground to mine as its predecessor, The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (abridged), which the festival's audiences have adored for two seasons past.

But under Eric Hissom's direction and his cast's inspired clowning, Complete History still makes it three hits in a row.

Created by three writers, Reed Martin, Adam Long and Austin Tichenor, who call themselves the Reduced Shakespeare Company, this show is history Rocky and Bullwinkle-style -- fractured, with no desire to get it right and a concerted effort to offend. Humorless historians might bristle, and a few right-wingers will get their hackles up over not-so-loving references to Ronald Reagan and Jesse Helms. Everybody else will roar.

Think of the story of the founding of Jamestown told as the best white-boy rap this side of Bulworth. Think of the witch-hunting Puritans of Massachusetts with a pastor named the Rev. Feral Orwell, who leads his youthful parishioners in games of Pin the Blame on the Warlocks and Hangman. Think of Lewis and Clark as a vaudeville team, with jokes so lame that they ought to be passing out crutches at the door.

A lot of this nonsense is in the script. But a lot of it has to come from director and actors, and this is where the festival scores. Hissom, who just finished a run in the title role of Macbeth, seems to have unleashed all the pent-up silliness he kept under wraps during the run of the Scottish play. And the actors take his lead and run.

Richard B. Watson plays his characters, from Franklin Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan, with a kind of game-show-host suavity: Imagine Alex Trebek hosting Queen for a Day, as Watson does here, with Trebek's ever-so-slightly patronizing sneer. And Tom Taylor makes a hilariously endearing dumbbell, a vacant-eyed character striving mightily to keep up as his cohorts race two or three mental steps ahead.

The intrepid costume designer Jack Smith has given the three men appropriately silly bits and pieces of attire to add onto their basic blue jeans and Colonial-style vests: They look especially fetching in white fright wigs topped by tricorner hats. And the rest of the production -- - setting, lights, sound and so on -- is as smoothly professional as the festival's audiences have come to expect.

Every once in a while the authors show they've reached their limits with American history, which isn't as consistently uproarious as the works of William Shakespeare when you're looking for something to make fun of. This show can be a little off-putting when it acknowledges that fact: There's nothing like a mention of Hiroshima to drop you to the ground with a thunk. Hissom and his cast make the best of the situation: They acknowledge the audience's silence, and then they move uproariously on.

Anyway, there's not a lot of point in analyzing Complete History, which resists being taken seriously almost all of the time. And there's no point in giving away too many of its jokes -- except to say that the cast grants equal importance to Gilligan's Island, Anne Murray and the show's corporate sponsors, that somebody reveals the surprise ending to a current hit movie and that anybody wishing to go home as dry as they arrived may want to avoid the splash zone.

Complete History is nothing more than "a Post-it note on the refrigerator of America," as Taylor's character puts it.  It's pointed. It's quick. And it's a lot funnier than any Cliff's Notes I've ever seen.

This play was written by Adam Long, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor, the party responsible for such over-the-top historical farces as The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged) and The Bible: The Complete Words of God (abridged). It offers the viewer 500 years of American history over the course of one two-hour performance. Those with an abject need for things to be historically accurate should skip this show. Time is off the essence here, and fact will be sacrificed for the sake of fitting everything into the allotted duration.

This play is a must for fans of American politics, history, sharp humor, slapstick and wonderful, talented acting.

In keeping with Shakespearean-style word play, "TCHOA" is filled with puns and groaners. One of the most inspired and silly bits concerns anagrams formed out of the letters in "American," and a lewd arrangement created out of the name of the infamous Spiro Agnew.

As the play closes, several sobering facts make clear the play's true lesson: You might as well laugh at the absurdities of American history because the truth is too depressing.