APRIL FOOLS

The new about-face of American comedy

PEE WEE HERMAN

Jockeying for position

The cutting edge is often an old saw; and Pee Wee Herman takes an uncharacteristically cerebral approach to the standard frat-party joke of undies on the head. Most of the time Pee Wee dons a tight gray suit, which he’s clearly outgrown, a dippy red bow tie, and white socks to cavort in his “Playhouse.” A two-time offender, Pee Wee is both a prisoner of childhood and a dirty, conniving adolescent. He shows off his rubber spiders and windup dolls. He also wears mirrors on his shoes so he can look up girls’ skirts.

In a culture where the young are assaulted by the depravity of adults, Pee Wee represents the comic antidote, a new wave naif. He is a hybrid of happy innocence and nasty punk attitudes, with a bedpan approach to humor that makes you bristle.

Is there life after high school? Only in America, where the options of joining a band or telling jokes remain viable well into middle age.

In the mid-’70s comedy stole rock’s thunder—stole, in fact, its energetic adolescent morality as well as its sex drive. While Richard Pryor tested our liberal reflexes along with our libidos, Lily Tomlin spawned characters that were absurdist white-trash cousins to Pryor’s alter egos and stormed Broadway with a show that had the bite of Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. While a woman in boys’ clothes named Fran Lebowitz raised a voice of reason in a babble of bad taste—and made us laugh as she scolded—Michael O’Donoghue, a man fond of ballet shoes, confronted Saturday Night Live fans with aggressive bad taste—and made us think as we gagged. And the hottest rock star in town was a killer nerd named Elvis Costello, whose alias suggested that he recognized the link between comedy and rock, and whose lyrics defined the new stance: “Oh, I used to be disgusted / Now I try to be amused.”

A few years later the once rabid comedy fans thrilled to the wretched excesses of the Dead Kennedys and garage bands too numerous to recall, then tottered home from the new wave night spots to watch Mary Tyler Moore reruns. The deeply cool—or the deeply disappointed—turned to that ’50s mainstay, art. With a conceptual C.

Today’s hip new comics have reclaimed the downtown ethos of the old punk scene and the self-references of performance art, with its metacliches and its ambivalent attitude toward art (and humor) itself.

While recidivists howl when Joan Rivers holds court on The Tonight Show, the avant-garde chuckles nervously at jokers like these five.

ANN

MAGNUSON

Catches the ironic butterfly

This eye-popping brand of evangelism is just part of the act; Ann Magnuson is more interested in takeoffs than outright blasphemy. High Priestess of the New York downtown club scene (and no mean self-promoter), she tarts herself up to suit her satiric target. A self-described “media heathen,” she is attracted to the trashiest aspects of pop culture. B-movie fans remember Magnuson from The Hunger, and rock fans from Pulsallama, a now defunct all-girl band that took The Gong Show aesthetic to new extremes. She’s got two new bands cooking, though—Vulcan Death Grip, a heavy-metal outfit, and Bleaker Street Incident, an homage to ’60s folkies.

Does she ever tire of trash? “I’m engaged in a personal mission,” Magnuson says, ‘‘to exorcise the spirits I grew up with. But maybe I’ve had too much radiation.”

ERIC

ABOGOSIAN

Pulls laughs out of

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nightmare atley

A Forty-second Street strip joint, a Bowery sidewalk, a dark street in the wrong neighborhood—Eric Bogosian’s turf is the danger zone that most city dwellers avoid. And Bogosian’s show is chillingly funny the way Taxi Driver was: you can either laugh or run.

But if you run, you miss some great performances: a vapid male stripper; a laconic instructor in the art of torture; a psychotic punk; a smug evangelist; a hectoring derelict; or a street hustler who mesmerizes with his manic rap: “Check it out...check it out.. .check it out.. .try it before you buy it.. .try it before you buy it.. .whaddya want.” Bogosian is more a performance artist than a stand-up comic, and his special talent is rendering each rogue in his nightmare gallery with such specificity and savage insight that the terrible becomes mundane— and vice versa.

STEVEN

WRIGHT*

Hits a disembodied funny bone

Steven Wright is the perfect minimalist comic: no props, no patter—in short, no shtick. He could probably get by without his body if it came to that.

Twenty-eight-year-old Wright developed his act in Boston, using a stunned, querulous persona to deliver a wacked-out series of equations he seems to have dreamed up somewhere between bedtime and detox. “I was cesarean born. You can’t really tell, although whenever I leave a house, I go out through a window.”

Delivered in the deadest of deadpans, lines like these often get a delayed response while the audience struggles with the reasoning that guides these tangents. But once the dots are connected, the gag is both hilarious and gratifying—like getting an A in Logic from the Nutty Professor.

GILBERT GOTTFRIED »

Unleashes his wizardly id

A veteran of Saturday Night Live, Gilbert Gottfried has always been a bit too much the wizard of id to make it in slick sketch humor. Most of the time he operates as if his audience isn’t there, and when he does acknowledge the customers, he greets them with a sneer: “I’m so glad to see you. I love you all. I want to take each and every one of you and squeeze you in my hands, squeeze you into a little paste and drip you... ”

Gottfried turns any available object into a prop for his psychic landscape: a book of matches becomes a jury in a courtroom. Or he’ll place a napkin over his face and do the Elephant Man singing Barry Manilow’s tearjerker “Mandy.” And if things aren’t going smoothly, he’ll turn on the audience: “Okay!” he screams. “Now you make me laugh.”