HBO ‘WOMEN’--TWO LAND THE LAUGHS

There’s probably no commodity more perishable in this period of post-feminist cultural reevaluation than the New Comedienne. At least that’s part of the after-impression left by HBO’s “On Location: Women of the Night” (tonight at 11 at reruns later in the month).

Ellen DeGeneres, Paula Poundstone, Rita Rudner and Judy Tenuta take the stage for individual sets (hosted by Martin Short, who labors heroically to keep the audience plumped up with cheer). Two score, two don’t, and you’re left with the peculiarly irresolute sensation of having been left at a tie ballgame--kiss-your-sister time, as the newscasters say by way of chuckling apologias.

DeGeneres and Poundstone are ineffectual, both having obviously incubated in the stale air of comedy club conventions, whose ingrown rhythms and references seem, as time goes by, to be shared by hundreds of interchangeable stand-up comics to diminishing effect.

DeGeneres, who starts the program, has a lumpen unisex look that isn’t offset by a fresh or penetrating, or even particularly witty, point of view. To come on saying “People ask me, ‘Were you funny as a child?’ ” is to assume that we already know her as someone funny. We don’t, which puts her at an immediate disadvantage, and the relative blandness of her material isn’t anything that closes the gap. She jokes about her childhood (“I thought I was going to kindergarten, turns out I was working in a factory”); her parents; the inexplicable attitude of hunters who keep deer heads on the wall because they’re beautiful (“My mother is attractive, but I keep a picture of her (instead)”), and concludes with a telephone call to God that might be more amusing if it weren’t so derivative of Bob Newhart at his most buttoned-down (God and DeGeneres exchange knock-knock jokes).

Poundstone is one of the more enigmatic of our newer comedians, a big, shuffling, shy-seeming woman who has the raw, lanky build of a triple-A ballplayer and the delivery of an Orson Bean in drag. She opens with a note about wanting to take more control of her life, “so I sleep 20 hours a day,” and segues into a passage about driving (her car has no power steering, so if she can’t immediately pull into a parking space in front of her friend’s house, it’s so long for now, friend). She has a good joke about weightlifting: “They say it’s a sport. When they pick up a heavy thing and put it down again, to me that’s indecision.” But like DeGeneres, she’s bent on chasing the joke instead of integrating it into a theme or a point of view, and her intense self-consciousness further alienates her.

Rita Rudner looks like a pretty younger sister of Jane Alexander and introduces herself as a former ballet dancer. Whether or not the latter is true, she has a sense of stage poise and an economy of movement that makes her arch sly-puss commentary the more cutting.

Rudner touches on several of the same themes as the others, including dating, parents and the perversities of life--she observes that when women are at their sexual peak, men are discovering a favorite chair. But she’s not quite the victim here as much as she is the comedic observer. She’ll confess to envy (she prefers Playboy Playmates to remain on another planet) and the consoling joys of shopping (a new outfit is often worth an old boyfriend), which some women may find trivializing. But Rudner, despite uneven material, has a rare quality of sophisticated detachment that doesn’t seem affected. She has a potential for being genuinely clever.

It’s unusual for one talent to be derivative of another and still succeed on terms that seem its own. If Roseanne Barr had never happened, who knows what approach Judy Tenuta would use? Barr’s indolent, complacent, self-exalting misanthropic persona is a touching-off point for Tenuta who, like Barr, refers to herself as a goddess and has nothing but amicable disdain for the “stud-puppets” out there in the audience who she fancies want to possess her.

But Tenuta is a great deal more theatrical than Barr, and alone worth your hour before the tube. A somewhat cylindrically shaped young woman dressed in a white silk gown draped in a vermilion scarf, her dark hair topped with a gardenia, she affects the falsetto voice of Judy Holliday contrasted with the hard Chicago derision of John Belushi, mixed further with something faintly Slavic and the falsetto ethereal dream-tone of a ‘30s movie heroine taking us back in time to some mystic movie rendezvous--all fronted by her accordion, which she refers to as “my IUD.”

Tenuta is an imaginative woman whose material is both colorful and full of Midwestern bluntness (“My brother Bosco’s just like you, only with a human head,” she says to a man in the audience). She elevates the common theme of sexual hostility to a comical extreme--men to her are squids, whales, trolls, sex-apes. If a female friend calls with a wedding invitation, she tells us “Yeah, I have time to buy her a blender cuz some pipe fitter is poaching her eggs, yeah, some bus boy from Meals on Wheels found her f-stop. I have better things to do, like stay in bed and complain.”

Tenuta’s material has been worked up into a rich comic density, and she has the fine performer’s ability to keep us amused and disarmed at the same time (she tells us that she dates the Pope because he’s a fashion plate who’ll bring her closer to God, but that isn’t enough for her to let him in to touch her Elvis painting--”the one that cries”). Cruel sister, but with the cruelty that Artaud theorized cuts us loose without really hurting anyone.