DICK SHAWN’S ODDBALL HUMOR, BAROQUE WIT

Shakespeare’s reference to “reverberant wit” almost eerily describes Dick Shawn. During a performance of his one-man show on Good Friday, Shawn asked his audience at UC San Diego if it could hear him without a microphone. Then he made a reference to the end of the world, fell to the floor and never got up.

It’s characteristic of a Shawn performance that for fully five minutes no one became alarmed. After all, this was the man who lay buried in the apocalyptic rubble of crumpled-up newspapers through the opening of his long-running show “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the Whole Wide World,” and remained flat on his back on stage through the entire intermission. You never knew what he was going to do next, and his recumbent pose was consistent with his weighty, wacko deliberations on Cosmogony and the Meaning of It All, conducted in an atmosphere of deep Beckettian gloom in which his mock-philosophical musings offered the only comic relief.

Shawn was a stylishly memorable actor with a baroque comic foppishness who played the outrageous as though it were not only normal but correct. He loved the grand, self-mocking gesture, which made his megalomania as Hitler in “The Producers” so effective and his replacement of Zero Mostel as Pseudolus in “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” a natural choice: Pseudolus was the ultimate con artist who knew you could only get away with a scam if you played it to the hilt. Shawn’s eccentrics were always committed, but something in his face and manner suggested that their loopy magniloquence masked the gnawing sensation that at bottom they didn’t know what they were committed to .

But it was as a stand-up--or lie-down--comedian that Shawn was most expressively himself. Shawn did too little to refresh his material over the years, but one could see why he was disinclined to change: His act and his life were of a piece in which smaller pieces didn’t fit, or had fallen out or had been put back upside-down. His comedy was cross-indexed with his life.

Those crumpled newspapers, for example. When Shawn tried to start a career in New York, he lost out in the finals of “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” and moved into an unfurnished room with his new wife. “We slept on newspapers,” he recalled later. “When she got up in the morning, I could read the headlines on her back.”

That room echoed the claustrophobia of the room in his Lackawanna, N.Y., childhood, which he shared with his parents and brother, and the set of his show echoed them both. Like Beckett’s Krapp, to whom life is an appendage of faulty memory, Shawn liked to eat bananas on stage. Only for him they evoked the lush fecundity of the jungle, a longed-for antithesis to the grim protracted industrial winters in which, as he said in a 1985 interview, “Nobody spoke at home. We had to look at each other all the time. Silence was a way of easing the tension. There was no intellectual discussion, no TV. You ate and left the table.”

Even Shawn’s narrow, vertical house, once owned by the Charles Laughtons and tucked away in that fabled Santa Monica glen where Brecht and Auden and Christopher Isherwood visited each other, seemed to contain a personal collage of mixed memories and exotic desires. Show-biz memorabilia coexisted with Egyptian, Italian and Japanese furniture and artifacts; a tiny quarrelsome pair of Bahian monkeys rattled their cage outside the living room window. Outside, the sun set on a glittering Pacific cove that looked like nothing in the rest of Los Angeles.

The whole thing was a dreamscape where dinosaurs perished because they could only walk forward, Wheatena mysteriously metamorphosed into that smelly stuff in one’s diaper, and Shawn could stand on the deck musing: “In the beginning, man didn’t know he had a brain. What did he need a brain for? There was nothing to remember.”

What Shawn told an interviewer about his show in 1978 remained true of it all along: “It’s about a man who doesn’t trust himself anymore, trying to survive as a comic. The world is swallowing him up. Everything’s going. Mores have changed. Sex. Toilet habits. Everything’s more out in the open.

“He wants to be more subtle, but he can’t. The news isn’t subtle. The filthy air isn’t subtle. The fact that every country has an atomic bomb. . . . There’s no pride left in detail, no more individual tailors or shoemakers. It’s all manipulation by the mass media. Get rid of it quick, come up with a new gimmick. People no longer know who they are or what they stand for.”

Shawn often alluded to a penchant for schizophrenia. In that 1985 interview, he remembered that very early in his career, in Miami, “I worked up a five-minute bit on a schizophrenic--I couldn’t spell it, but I knew it was me--a split personality. Comedy seemed natural. It was easier to talk to 500 people than to one. No faces, no eyes to look into. It seemed a proper vocation.” About playing Hitler, he said “an unactable part has to be played by a maniac.”

It doesn’t take a deep reading into Shawn’s other allusions to his childhood and youth to realize that his fanciful flights rocketed out of an indestructible bleak-house of emotional suffering. Shawn was a gifted athlete, actor and comedian; the comic intrigue he generated in performance wasn’t based on allowing us a glimpse into a personal pathology. It was based instead on how his paranoid intuitions of the world matched up with how we’ve come to experience it too. Shakespeare’s view of life as a walking stage has ballooned in the 20th Century to life as a show-biz extravaganza, an unending polyglot talk show hosted in part by a White House actor. Show biz has become the cynosure for excitement and importance, and the illusion of meaning.

It’s no accident that all the players in Shawn’s glitzy band were dummies, and as he turned his back we saw a sequinned Star of David embossed on his cherry-red tuxedo jacket--what’s sacred anymore now that human or spiritual values and entertainment values have become entwined?

Shawn was hardly immune to the seduction--after all, show business was more of a way of life for him than it is for most of the rest of us, and in the two or three times this writer socialized with him, he was always “on.” Shawn was a nervous, driven, haunted man, but such was the nature of his comedy that he didn’t spook us. He was the gentlest of performers, our comedic ombudsman who stood on stage and puzzled for himself and the rest of us the palpable strangeness of being alive.