COMEDY REVIEW : A SATIRIC TRIO AT MOCA

Social and political comment form the common thread of the “Peter, Paul and Harry” show at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Ahmanson stage through next weekend.

Peter Bergman and Paul Krassner take the more conventional roles of outside comedy agitators who assume we’re all too eager to be in on the joke. Their portion of the show, which opened Thursday, is relatively heavy going. Harry Shearer’s cunning satire, by contrast, shows us that the ultimate humor right now is best delivered with a bland face.

Shearer is one of the few talents around who can keep pace with our culture’s penchant for self-parody without enveloping us in the gloomy paranoid shadows of the inflexible left. The mole is our true modern subversive.

Bergman, who starts the show, comes on like a hyperkinetic Jules Feiffer character howling at a litany of woes legitimate enough in themselves but altogether raking us with the alarms of the liberal cognoscenti: arms deals with religious fanatics in Iran, Hindu assassinations, Salvadoran death squads in L.A., acid rain, the extermination of the snail darter. Bergman’s autobiographical notes and reported dreams show us a character sinking in layers and layers of cultural fascism and apocalypse.

“Vickie Frost (in a Tennessee lawsuit) wants to repeal the Renaissance. You can’t do that! I spent four years studying the Renaissance!” Doctor Doom, author of “Scare the Nation,” warns, “The Bible is not the problem. It’s the people who sit here and watch the Bible on TV.” Superman, the man of steel, has become aluminum and moved to Brazil and Japan. Bergman sees a “Honk if you love Jesus” bumper sticker. “I honked, and the guy gave me the finger.” Bergman’s Everyman would like to think his house and garden and flowers and friends are wonderful, but his dreams are ghastly. In one, he’s trapped in a quiz show, “Eat or Be Eaten.”

Bergman has retained his vocal skills from his days with the Firesign Theatre, but he hasn’t developed any accompanying stage technique. He overacts at every turn, trembling, yelling, panting, in a frenzy of unrelieved terror and complaint that might be more effective if it had some shading or semblance of artful choice--something to indicate that he means to take us somewhere instead of pinning us under a free-flowing peroration. The performance is an extension of the material, which is hectic and unfocused (how can the aluminum Superman live in two places at once?). His whole act is wrapped up in theatrical bumper stickers.

Krassner follows with a pure standup routine that more overtly plays on the assumption of shared attitudes with his audience (it may be that the best art assumes moral neutrality or even opposition in its audience, which it seduces with irresistible coercion; preaching to the converted is a bore). Krassner has labored heroically and diligently over the years to unearth abuses of individual freedoms wherever he’s seen them. Unfortunately, he tends to see them in the same places--or else the power elite, to him, always wears the same face and parts its hair on the right.

Krassner’s debt to Lenny Bruce is expressed in his jazzy, free-associative style. He doesn’t have Bruce’s penchant for the set piece, however, and although he sometimes makes startling connections (Bob Dylan’s search for his Hebraic roots has left him in a half-way house of secular humanism), he doesn’t know how to angle a joke or polish an observation (his intellectual energy sustains his writing, but it doesn’t carry into his performance).

Krassner asks a lot of an audience--his connection between the University of Texas tower killer and the Iran- contra hearings is characteristically tenuous. And he plays it safe. Ronald Reagan, John Poindexter, Congress, politicos in general--they’re all old statues well-splattered from numberless comedy overflights. There are other tyrannies closer to the edge of what passes for progressive thought that bear looking into.

Shearer’s concluding segment is a bit uneven, but a good deal of it is first-rate. His act opens with a Vegas-style musical tribute to Fawn Hall (shown on five video monitors fluffing her hair during her congressional testimony). He ends with a shirtless British rocker named Derek who’s now into Christian rock (of his former colleagues he says: “We’re all into hell, but from different perspectives.”) and wants to demonstrate the lyric potential of the electric bass.

In between is a lethal portrait of a solemn, self-important sportswriter reading his precious prose before a group at the Valley Jewish Community Center (“The air was heavy with humidity and expectation . . . the flag hung heavy on its pole of prominence.”); a dead-on portrait of Reagan reading at his weekly radio show--the routine works because you can almost conceive of Reagan actually saying the things Shearer has him say (“What I’ve learned in the past few months is not pleasant. Learning never is.”); a send-up of those half-time testimonials that you see on televised college football games; and a very good and angry segment on how commercial advertising abandoned the American flag once it had been worn out, that is, once our “Morning in America became the morning after.”

The physical demands of Shearer’s segment are such that its pacing is sometimes sluggish, and there’s no build or overall shape. But Shearer’s still a fresh, witty observer who understands the value of proportion and understatement. There’s a certain ruin that falls on a cultural icon once you can no longer look at it with a straight face. He’s done a lot of quiet laying waste over the years in parodies so definitive that you can never see their subjects the same way again.

“Peter, Paul and Harry” are presented by MOCA and Pipeline Inc. as part of their current “Angel’s Flight” series. Performances Thursday through Saturday, 8 p.m., with Saturday and Sunday matinee, 2 p.m., at 250 S. Grand Ave., (213) 626-6828. Ends Aug. 2.