There is something comfortingly disposable about November, David Mamet's recent Oval Office comedy now at ACT. After he lands his second or third joke with the patterns, rhythms, and base-line humor that you could find in any number of television sitcoms, you quickly realize that the dramatic demands are going to be low and relaxed laughter is the main goal here.

The play was seen on Broadway during the waning days of the Bush presidency, and the looming 2008 elections gave it a topicality that should not be mistaken for specific relevancy. November is a broad satire of American politics, and while a critical plot point turns on the issue of gay marriage, it seems as much a theatrical device as a social statement. But at least Mamet, who doesn't often reveal specific political leanings, creates a scenario in which the play's proponent of same-sex nuptials holds the trump card.

November takes place a week before a re-election bid that President Charles Smith is clearly going to lose. "What is it about me people don't like?" the president asks his right-hand man. "That you're still here," comes the answer. But at least he'll get a presidential library, he surmises, since it's guaranteed in the Constitution.

President Smith is a kind of everyman, albeit on the low end of the smarts chart, who caught the brass ring and wasn't sure what to do with it. Popularity and power were nifty trinkets that he squandered, and he lurches between desolate resignation to his looming defeat and cockamamie schemes to avert it. Besides holding the nation's turkey population hostage a few weeks before Thanksgiving, he pins his hope on the Great Speech his speechwriter promises to deliver only if he agrees to officiate at her marriage to her female partner.

Amid the chaos of exploding turkeys, a Native American wielding a poison-dart blowpipe, and the easy laughs of a sneeze-afflicted character, Mamet does occasionally dabble in darker colors. The president, for example, is an unapologetic homophobe, but since his judgment is rendered suspect on just about every subject he addresses, his barbs don't carry even the venom of Chief Dwight Grackle's concoction of an otter tooth laced with wolverine blood and fox semen. This isn't the world of nervous laughter that Mamet has previously provoked with hateful words in the likes of Glengarry Glen Ross or Speed-the-Plow .

Director Ron Lagomarsino's production follows the breezy rhythms that Mamet created, and deftly keeps the farce afloat. Andrew Polk, who played a misogynistic Hollywood player in ACT's Speed-the-Plow, is a genial buffoon as the president. Anthony Fusco lands some strong laughs as his long-suffering assistant, and Rene Augesen, unrecognizable from her usual glamour roles at ACT, does keen comic work as the speechwriter. Manoel Feliciano, another member of ACT's acting company, is also unrecognizable from his previously seen dashing countenance, now convincingly evoking a fussy nerd as the turkey-industry flack. As the Micmac chief who is eyeing Nantucket for a mega-casino, Steven Anthony Jones is briefly, but enjoyably, showcased.

November concludes on a note of hesitant nobility and giddy corruption, which, in the world according to David Mamet, must be considered a happy ending.

November will run at ACT through Nov. 22. Tickets are $17-$82. Call 749-2228 or go to www.act-sf.org.