COMEDY REVIEW : ANDERSON, BARR HIT A NERVE

It’s a pity Louie Anderson and Roseanne Barr have had only one local stop together this summer (they played the Universal Amphitheatre on Friday night as part of a national tour). Barr’s raunchy drive and Anderson’s deft Midwestern character sketches complement each other nicely. At the end, you don’t feel you’ve watched two showroom models roll off of the same comedy club assembly line.

Unlike many stand-ups whose careers ricochet between TV sitcoms and 20-minute club sets, each has a theatrical feel for a large audience’s collective nervous system. A lot of Anderson’s portion of the show is met with silence (though they come on briefly at the beginning as Jim and Tammy Bakker about to make a movie called “Children of a Looser God,” each works alone). But the silence doesn’t represent the dead space between jokes; it’s the silence of people listening hard. Contrastingly, a lot of Barr’s material is met with shrieks of surprise as she forays into the unsayable.

Anderson is a big portly fellow with a bay-window front reminiscent of Sidney Greenstreet, and while he occasionally jokes about his heft, most of his material is based on the kind of memories of growing up almost everyone can share. Remember the local bully who came up and wordlessly grabbed you in a fierce, unrelenting headlock?

Dad is a tough taskmaster, humorless and comical at the same time as he slows the family car to check out some unfamiliar newcomer to the neighborhood (“Look at that,” he says with soft disdain, as though viewing something foreign and repellent). Anderson- fils has kept a quiet record of the old man’s preposterous fulminations--”If I was the last man on earth, that moron would turn left on me!”--a record that shall remain forever sealed for as long as his father, whose orders are always accompanied by the click of a loaded pistol, is around. You can feel for Anderson’s youthful indignation when, viewing his father working under the car, he ponders kicking out the jack. “ ‘College or prison,’ I thought.”

Anderson has also provided us with a build so that, when he has an accident in the family Bonneville, you can understand the garage mechanic’s sentiments as he says, “Look Lou, I know your dad. Why don’t you just lay under the hoist. I’ll crush your legs.”

The family portrait also includes Anderson’s ditsy Mom, “the window monitor” (he imitates her stealing over to the curtain and peering out to witness the arrival of the Johnsons next door) who won’t let him keep a cat. “Oh no, they lick the butter.” And he gives us every bit of the deep chagrin a youngster feels as his mother decelerates to five miles per hour on the freeway ramp.

The endless tradition of sibling cruelty is also recorded as the youngest in the family always has his flesh twisted in cruel silence by his older brothers, who also terrify him with tales of the haunted swamp out there that will find you and suck you in. What gargoyle memories inhabit our familial past, with its outward show of domestic order and peace!

Anderson will wander afield into his own adulthood (“You know you’re getting older when, after you eat, you look for a place to lay down”) but it’s only at the conclusion, as he slows his car to cast a flinty, intolerant glance at a band of punk rockers, that we realize all these comedic touches are of a piece. His references are so vivid that often he needs only to make a silent gesture for us to understand what he’s talking about (his gestures themselves take on a graceful ceremonial function). At the end, we see he’s become his own father, as indeed most of us become our parents. Anderson has created a complete comedy canvas; it’s an artful and touching thing indeed to start us out with a joke and leave us with a bit of wisdom.

Like most people, your reviewer has known the work of Roseanne Barr only through television, which, though it’s served her well, hasn’t served her as fully as a live appearance where she can be seen more (no pun intended) in the round. TV’s focus on her slatternly gum-chewing face, and her plaintive whine that strikes you at any hour with the neural misery of a deep hangover, played more to the image of an indolent, complacent frau who lived to feed her face--an overblown icon of consumerism. And you wondered if this misanthropic figure wasn’t a sauntering post-feminist example of Lily Tomlin’s line, “Man invented language out of his deep-seated need to complain.”

“She gets away with an awful lot,” noted an observer Friday night, and indeed Barr did. Even by conventional standards, some of her material is foul. But she has the true comedian’s gift of converting anything into humor by making it somehow germane. And more important than her fine timing and imagery, she addresses a large segment of people--housewives and women who stay home during the day--who tend to be spoken at rather than to by television. The loneliness and tedium of a day at home, capped off by the return of a surly and unsympathetic husband, is something a great many women know or fear.

Barr’s note about watching the Phil Donahue show strikes the opening chord: “You can really learn from Donahue. I didn’t know you could be a woman in a man’s body.” Her take at the incongruity of the notion is funny, and she caps it with “You go out and you can’t parallel park.”

Part of Barr’s appeal is in her obvious resistance towards our consumer’s image of physical desirability. “As I am. All or not at all,” James Joyce said in “Ulysses.” So does Barr, who, after visiting a local clothes shop and asking if there weren’t something that could make her look thinner, is greeted with, “Yeah, a month in Bangladesh!” No middle-class pretensions for her : “I slammed the door so hard, the trailer fell off the cinder blocks.” Later, she refers to visiting a local gourmet restaurant atop the Texaco station. “I had the Linguini Boy-Ar-Dee.”

Most of Barr’s material is about men and the details of married life that usually remain unutterable (locked in the bathroom on their wedding night, Barr hears her husband banging at the door, “Come on, Roseanne, this beer’s going through me”). This line reports frustration about kids: “The experts say ‘Never hit your kid in anger.’ When are you supposed to hit him, when you’re feeling festive?” To her husband’s complaint about her driving: “I guess it just takes that peculiar mix of testosterone and Aqua Velva.”

Why is Barr so affecting? Because she speaks to the ordinary people who won’t cut and run from the rigors of domestic encampment. “You gotta be out of your skull, but you gotta love ‘em,” she says of men. And to the airy notion that challenge lives in the fast lane, she fires back, “Try a relationship. Try facing a mortgage for 30 years.”

She speaks to the small heroism of seeing things through.