“Mankind is in the house!” declared Bono at the Corporate Name Stadium Where the Baltimore Ravens Play last night. Look, you can’t stop him talking like that. Larry Mullen, Jr., U2’s ever-scowling drummer, has tried. And mankind was, empirically speaking, present in large part, to the tune of roughly 80,000 people.

“We’ve got new songs, we’ve got old songs, we’ve got songs we can hardly play!” As usual, Bono, you’re mostly right. U2’s supersized pageant at FedEx Field last night was an awkward, sometimes shapeless, frequently thrilling mix of new of and old. Perhaps in deference to the formidable Bono-quaciousness of prior U2 gigs in this town, where the Nobel Prize nominee has effectively become a part-time resident, U2 gave us a lunch-special version of the…

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of being right up close at a U2 concert, let me divulge a spoiler: Bono — a.k.a. Paul Hewson, a.k.a. The Fly, a.k.a Mr. MacPhisto, champion of Africa and two-time Nobel Prize nominee, debt-relief crusader and F-bomb-dropping bane of the Federal Communications Commission, the big-brained, big-hearted, big-mouthed and wholly unembarrassable front man for The (all together now!) World’s Biggest Band — is a wee, short…