Comic actor and Emmy-winning writer Robert Wuhl is best known as the star of the HBO series, Arli$$. But in 2006 for an HBO special, he created and starred in a combination stand-up monologue, college lecture and PowerPoint demo called Assume the Position. In it, he cast a merrily jaundiced eye on “the stories that made America,” and “the stories that America made up” — meaning, in several cases, the kind of doubtful histories or political hackjob biographies that 19th century American writers such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne turned out. History is storytelling, Wuhl argues, but these inaccurate stories became so popular they entered our general culture never to be entirely removed: Columbus proving the world is round, for example, or the heroic ride of Paul Revere, which wasn’t nearly as heroic as the one by Israel Bissell (a name that doesn’t exactly ring through the halls of history: “He sounds like a Jewish vaccuum cleaner” — Wuhl).

There was a sequel (Assume the Position 201), and now Wuhl has taken his irreverent treatment of American myths and myth-making to the stage, expanding it with autobiographical material. Assume the Position plays this weekend at the Out of the Loop Festival at the WaterTower Theatre in Addison.