COMIC HAS INDUSTRY BY THE THROAT

Bob (The Bobcat) Goldthwait is hardly your typical blow-dried, super-slick stand-up comedian. Trembling in front of the audience in faded jeans and a worn-out sleeveless navy sweat shirt, he is a blithering, hissing, screaming, howling, snarling, apparent maniac. An escapee from a grade-D slasher film. A cross between Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider and Jason, the protagonist of the “Friday the 13th” movies.

But it is a combination that has caught the moviemaking establishment’s ears and eyes. At a recent showcase at the Comedy Store (an evening where a club is closed to the public and industry people are invited to see an act), the audience was dense with agents, managers, studio production executives and even a few studio heads, all of whom were there to see what Goldthwait was all about.

Though he’s hardly a household word, he has developed a strong cult following. The 23-year-old comic has appeared on the David Letterman show three times. His shows regularly sell out in San Francisco (where he honed his act before moving to Los Angeles), and Hollywood has taken notice. Goldthwait has already completed three movies--two of which, “Police Academy 3; Back in Training” and “One Crazy Summer”--will be out this summer (his first film was “Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment”).

Mark Canton, president of worldwide theatrical production at Warner Bros. and an early supporter of the young comic, believes Goldthwait has a big future in the movie business. “He reminds me of Belushi in the way the audience reponds to him,” says Canton. “He’s freewheeling and definitely travels to the beat of his own drum, but he’s under control. That’s the good news.”

John Goldwyn, a senior vice president at MGM who helped cast Goldthwait for “Police Academy 2” while working at the Ladd Co., says Goldthwait’s uniqueness was instantly appealing. “There is something almost frighteningly manic about the characters he portrays, and it’s that manic intensity that makes it all so fresh. I think he’s going to have a real career in this business.”

The comedian is anything but an overnight success. A native of Syracuse, N.Y., he started working as a stand-up comic at 16, when he was often introduced as Jimmy Goldthwait because he had to borrow his older brother’s ID to work the clubs. As a teen-ager he was heavily influenced by comedians like Andy Kaufman and Robin Williams, but Goldthwait says his bizarre sense of humor came from his parents. (His mother is a recently retired Sears employee, his father is a sheet-metal worker.)

“I remember there was always a lot of very strange behavior in our house,” Goldthwait said in an interview at manager Sandy Gallin’s office. “I remember crying at this party because my dad was perched on top of the refrigerator threatening to dive into an open jar of mayonnaise. He scared the hell out of me.”

Now Goldthwait is scaring his audiences. “I’m every parent’s dream--is your daughter home?” he asks, his face contorted, his rooster-tail haircut pointing straight toward the ceiling. “I may be weird, but you folks are here watching me.”

Goldthwait, who is seemingly willing to try or say anything on stage, is reserved and shy offstage and reveals little about his personal life. He does admit that as a teen-ager he had a drinking problem (he says he was arrested several times for drunken and disorderly behavior and adds with a grin that he will neither confirm nor deny rumors that he was once confined to a mental institution).

Although this is a story about a rising young comedian, you won’t read a lot of punch lines here. Much of Goldthwait’s material is not printable in the confines of a family newspaper, and more important, much of it simply does not translate well to the printed page. How does one explain a screaming, stuttering, slobbering comedian whose opening line, “Gee, it feels great to be here tonight,” takes six minutes to be delivered?

Goldthwait, who says he is not a stand-up comic but a “loud dancer,” takes the audience through a kind of primal therapy-improv-scream session where the shock value alone often keeps them laughing. There are times in the act when his language is difficult to understand, and at one point in his career his screaming sidelined him from performing for a few weeks when he developed polyps in his throat.

The screaming has also kept him off the Johnny Carson show and, according to some critics, made his humor somewhat inaccessible. “I remember sitting in a meeting and someone saying well maybe if you didn’t scream so much in your act,” says Goldthwait. “But to me, it’s like, why don’t you get someone else to go out on stage and talk about milk. There’s a thousand comics that can tell you how hard it is to drive in L.A.”

Much of this madness, says Goldthwait, stems from a combination of anger and fear. “You always hear comics saying how they love to make people laugh and what a great gift it is. I’m going to be blatantly honest: The reason I’m out there is because I’m a huge egomaniac and at the same time I’m really insecure. . . . Sometimes I scare the hell out of me.”

The anger in the performance--and there is plenty of it--comes from real feelings as well. Though Goldthwait uses little political material in his show, he makes it clear that while he’s happy with the way his own career is progressing, he is concerned about the greater problems of the world. “I’m frightened and I don’t think I’m alone,” he says, getting serious for a moment. “I grew up with the fear of nuclear war and there are a lot of horrified people out there. Even the yuppies are scared. Maybe anger is a way of showing fear.”

Goldthwait is at something of a crossroads now. His stand-up career is rolling along and the movie offers continue to come in. But he has obvious mixed emotions about the movie game. “I went in to pitch a movie (suggest a story) and these executives said, ‘Great, it’s got a beginning, a middle and an end, let’s make it.’ I walked out of the meeting feeling real high and then I found out some guy who wasn’t at the table said no and he had more power than the whole tableful of these guys. That annoys me, but it’s a business and I realize that.”

The other frustration is dealing with industry executives who have suggestions for him on how to be funnier. “I know what’s funny and what’s not and when some guy who used to be a limo driver and is now a film executive is telling me why I’m funny or not funny, I want to break him in half.”

Of course these days Goldthwait is much more diplomatic than that. He continues to make the Hollywood rounds, though he understands that he’ll probably never play the romantic leading man. “My goal in life has never been to be driving a Corvette with a beautiful blonde on my arm. . . . I’m going to treat the movie business just like high school. I never went out of my way to let the other kids understand me. I just did what I wanted to do.

“Quentin Crisp once said don’t change, wait for society to catch up with you,” says Goldthwait. “And when they do, I’ll change again.”