Ranting, Raving, Doing the Dishes

By Richard Zoglin

Stepping in front of a live audience all alone is a pressure-packed moment for any stand-up comedian, but no one seems to handle it worse than Bob Goldthwait. Wavering between what appears to be incapacitating stage fright and drug-induced hysteria, Goldthwait delivers his lines in a choked, trembling voice that regularly erupts into shrieks of agony. "Thank you very . . . thank you very . . . thaaaarrrrgggghhhh!" were the first words from his mouth in a recent HBO special taped at Manhattan's Bottom Line. Two or three more half-finished sentences followed, then an angry shout of defiance: "I never masturbated in my life!"

"Crazy time" is what Johnny Carson calls it when the comedy gets a bit weird on the Tonight show. But the real crazies rarely make it to Carson's stage. Goldthwait did have one Tonight appearance a year ago, when Joan Rivers was guest host, and some of his offbeat contemporaries can occasionally be seen in such hipper network venues as Late Night with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. But increasingly, the showcase for innovative comic talent is cable, the Off-Broadway of TV comedy.

Cable's pay channels -- primarily HBO, Showtime and Cinemax -- early on discovered comedy as a fertile source of original programming. With no network censors to contend with, stand-up comics had virtually free rein in language and subject matter. Comedy concerts featuring everyone from Rodney Dangerfield to Eddie Murphy quickly became staples of the cable schedule. Comedy series inevitably came next. Some, like Showtime's Brothers and HBO's 1st & Ten, have been only marginally different from routine network fare. But HBO's Not Necessarily the News, now in its fifth year, offers welcome dollops of topical (if frequently toothless) political satire. Freshest of all is the engaging It's Garry Shandling's Show on Showtime, an unexpected hit that has just won a renewal for three more years. Meanwhile, the Cinemax Comedy Experiment has served as the umbrella for an array of inventive comedy specials. The best so far this year: Chris Elliott's Action Family, which skewered the cliches of two TV genres, private-eye dramas and sitcoms, by yoking them into one ludicrously mismatched half hour.

The budding stars of cable's alternative comedy scene, however, are a new group of performers who are pushing the limits of the stand-up genre. Traditional stand-up comedians, from Alan King through Jay Leno, have usually presented themselves as normal folks, people like you and me who happen to have funny things to say about dating or television or life in New York City. The new gang appear onstage as determined misfits -- sometimes menacing, sometimes pathetic, always glaringly out of place. One of the quirkiest is Emo Philips, 31, a waiflike creature with a Prince Valiant haircut who floats onto the stage like some fugitive from Mother Goose and talks in a limp, languorous singsong. The star of a recent HBO concert, he shows a fondness for whimsical absurdities ("I'm not as good a swimmer as I used to be -- thanks to evolution"), but his material is not quite strong enough to overcome the monotony of his presentation.

Monotony is a danger, too, with Goldthwait. But his zoned-out stage character wears better than Philips', both because it has more psychological resonance and because it functions organically as part of his comedy. Goldthwait, 24, who has appeared in the Police Academy films and in Burglar with Whoopi Goldberg, packs a whole analyst's couchful of anxiety, fear, anger and guilt into one sweating, simmering package: the comedian as psychotic. "I can legally kill anybody I want," he announces at one point. "I really don't think there's a court in the world that wouldn't say I was insane at the time of the crime."

Not that Goldthwait's material is totally subliterate raving. In his latest HBO concert, Share the Warmth, he offered pungent comments on everything from Iranscam to Lucille Ball ("A 75-year-old woman performing slapstick comedy -- is that funny to you?"), along with hapless autobiographical asides. "I lost my job," he whimpers. "No, wait. I didn't really lose my job. I mean, I know where my job is still. It's just when I go there, there's this new guy doing it." Underneath the shrieks and stammers, a shrewd comic mind is percolating.

Sam Kinison, another exponent of the new school of "maniacal comedy," could be Goldthwait's evil twin. Like Goldthwait, Kinison depends on high decibels for laughs; his routines build into angry punch lines delivered as piercing screams. But where Goldthwait is a demented child, Kinison, who drapes his pudgy frame in the seedy overcoat of a Times Square flasher, is a depraved adult, fuming over the indignities visited on him in the Reaganite, feminist '80s. A former Pentecostal minister who grew up in Peoria, Ill., Kinison, 33, specializes in foulmouthed tirades on sex and religion. Several of his lines had to be blipped from a Saturday Night Live appearance last fall, and HBO was concerned enough about Kinison's raw language to reschedule the debut of his new special, airing this week, partly to avoid having it fall during Easter weekend.

Though Kinison stretches the bounds of good taste, his bombast can be furiously funny. His rantings against women, for instance, may outrage some, but they are a cathartic antidote to cool yuppie relationship-speak, brazen in their sheer excess. "I'm not worried about hell," he says, " 'cause I was ((exploding into a shout)) married for two f years! Hell would be like Club Med!" A stint at the piano for a song to his ex-girlfriend turns into a string of obscenities ending with "I want my records back!" His blasphemous accounts of the Last Supper and the Resurrection are startling reminders that even in the post-Lenny Bruce age, comedians still have the power to offend.

After a trip through the psychic recesses of Goldthwait and Kinison, Garry Shandling's mild-mannered neuroticism seems downright healthy. Indeed, the easygoing Shandling, 37, is at least one cable star who is equally welcome on Carson's Tonight show, where he frequently fills in as guest host. His Showtime series looks at first glance like a familiar network sitcom, with trivial plots revolving around Shandling's problems with his neighbors, girlfriends and mother. The difference is that Shandling never lets the audience forget that it is all a TV show. He appears at the start of each episode to explain what will happen, makes frequent asides to the camera and discusses the "moral" with cast members at the end. In the middle of the show he might tell the crew, "Why don't you guys just cut to the next scene, and I'll meet you there, 'cause I'm gonna walk." Even the opening theme song is about nothing but itself: "This is the theme to Garry's show/ The opening theme to Garry's show/ This is the music that you hear/ As you watch the credits."

Breaking television's "fourth wall" to talk to the camera is hardly a new idea; it dates back at least to Burns and Allen in the early '50s. But no TV show has ever provided such piquant Pirandellian commentary on the medium ) itself. On Shandling's Show real life is indistinguishable from TV life -- and both look pretty silly. A guest star, Rob Reiner, unexpectedly drops by for one episode, but Garry can't find anything for him to do. So Rob washes the dishes while Garry does his laundry. "On this show," Shandling observes, "ironing can be like a car chase." After a few evenings with Shandling and his cable compatriots, going back to the car chases could prove difficult.