THE UNGUARDED SATIRE OF BILL FRENZER

Many if not most of America’s representative artists have come out of the Midwest, some of our finest comedians among them. (Johnny Carson is from Nebraska and Merle Kessler, a.k.a. Ian Shoales, grew up in Minnesota, where Garrison Keillor remains firmly and lyrically entrenched.) The comedian may be the Midwest’s premiere ambassador to the rest of the country.

Bill Frenzer is among that company. At 37, he’s had at least a couple of decades of tilting lances at America’s forms of sentimentality. (“Dead Puppies Aren’t Much Fun” was his underground hit song that draws a grin and a grimace at the same time.) He’s a sly favorite with the Dr. Demento crowd, and has played out front of his own Ogden Edsl Wahalia Blues Ensemble Mondo Bizzario Band, as well as his KROQ radio show “Mondo Sandwich.”

Frenzer is at an age where most other comedians--those not afflicted with terminal self-delusion--have suffered such raging burnout at having failed the Big Time that they wouldn’t be caught dead performing in a club. Frenzer is not so driven. He likes to give entertainment, and you can take it on whatever level you like. He fronts a six-piece band with a big sound, for example, directed by bassist Ross Wright, where Joe Source plays hot licks on saxophone and Jean Roth offers a most improbable musical presence via the French horn.

The music is hefty-sounding and bright. Frenzer could pass for a baker who samples his own wares--his pale face is open and fleshy, and his eyes offer a hint of being partly focused on the far-off. His costume betrays an otherwise Rotarian presence: Tied eighth notes adorn the right sleeve of his jacket, his necktie sports a school of eyes, his hat resembles a partly incinerated feathered fez. Overall he looks like a beefy conventioneer who stuck his finger in a light socket and was blasted by the apocalypse.

Frenzer’s regular venue is Olio’s Limbo Lounge downtown on Sunset Boulevard, where he recently concluded a show called “Bill Frenzer Alone and Unguarded.” (He’s scarcely alone; the unguarded part, he says, comes from his having been fired on outside the club one night by an angry local, who quickly took his pistol and his indignation indoors.)

Frenzer doesn’t have a lot of performance tension. His material requires some listening to. His songs and bits include “Beautiful But Boring” (about a tediously self-centered girlfriend); the “Newspaper Opera” (where he improvises on the days’ headlines); “Only White People Dance Like That” (with a slow-shuffle white folks’ dance demonstration); a ‘50s-style piece titled “Atomic Cocktail” and a mordantly funny number called “Turn in Your Parents” (“It’s the least you can do/Federal agencies are depending on you/It’s red, white and blue/You’ll get on Donahue”).

By the end of Frenzer’s act, you don’t feel, as you do with many stand-ups, that you’ve been gang-tackled. He comes on, he amiably plays, and then he’s off. There’s no great show of neurotic sexual anxiety and ineptitude. His views are more social than personal.

“I don’t buy the struggling-comedian bit,” he said. “You can always make your way if you’re willing to be open about how you’ll go. I’ve done radio, video and albums. If I stopped today, it would’ve been a great career.

“I grew up in Omaha. My dad was a attorney and I had an idea for a while that I might be a lawyer, too. But entertainment always had me hooked, from the early days when I saw Hal Perrin and the Mimic Macks lip-sync pop songs from the jukebox in drag. I’ve been a performer since grade school, and even though I have a film and journalism degree from Creighton University, entertaining has always been it. I formed the Ogden Edsl group in college and have probably taken that band through 150 musicians. I moved out here to perform, and had a weekly show on KROQ.

“For a while, I tried to be more commercial, but that got to be very boring. I’m happy to see that satire is making a comeback. The political climate right now is so absurd that it begs poking fun at. The ‘50s going into the ‘60s was a great era for American satire, and I feel the same way about the ‘80s going into the ‘90s. Being from the Midwest is certainly a great help. It lends you a more objective viewpoint on things. You’d have to say that a certain perspective comes of being 1,500 miles from the action on either coast. There’ll always be an an opportunity for comedy when you pit Midwestern values against those you see coming out of New York and Los Angeles.

“I couldn’t tell you what specifically drives me to do comedy, except I know that when I see people take themselves too seriously, a red flag goes up.”

PUNCH LINES: Lily Tomlin, on her youth: “If Dickens had been living in Detroit and going to Hutchins Junior High School (where Tomlin started her teen years), he might have written ‘It was the worst of times’ and simply left it at that.”

Jackie Mason, on his paranoia: “I myself was once self-conscious to such an extent that I couldn’t talk to people at all. It’s hard to believe. Do you know that if I went to a football game and saw the players go into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me?”