Hollow Laughs : Instead of substance, many young comics of today seek celebrity and trade in trivia

Two stories have been bouncing around America like indestructible stadium balloons for the better part of the last decade. One asks, “Who are the new comedians?”; the other goes on to cite the boom of comedy clubs throughout the land. No doubt about it, with networks and cable TV now in the act, comedy has become big business.

Two of the five richest entertainers in a recent Forbes magazine survey are comedians (Bill Cosby and Eddie Murphy), and a middling stand-up comic who stays out on the road can make the better part of six figures per annum.

But the movie “Punchline” brings the story into a different focus. If the more classical role of the stand-up comedian has been the outsider looking in on our behalf, things have changed. Despite its derisive pro forma chortling at the old Gipper, modern comedy has cozied up to the Reagan years. Where once it was about truth telling, now it’s about making it.

If comedy has become the performance art form of the ‘80s, it isn’t exactly because we’ve seen one of those incandescent fusions of talent that flare up in certain times and places, such as Paris in the ‘20s, or New York in the ‘50s. The comedy explosion is partly based on small-time entrepreneurship--the amazingly cost-effective process of club owners paying a comedian nothing or a relatively small sum while raking in profits from the door and the drinks--and because it’s just about the last form of intimate exchange between entertainer and audience in American life.

Comedy is to the ‘80s what jazz was to the ‘50s: People alone in a room together listening to the outpouring of individual expression, live and unpredictable and shifting moment to moment on intangible currents of spontaneous exchange. It’s one of our last venues whose ambiance is charged with human contact, a need grown more desperate as the lively arts in all their huckstering and commercial numbers crunching sail out of touch with our inner lives.

Consider: The content of most movies doesn’t live up to their technological brilliance. Television is a marketing medium; no matter what transpires in it, every few minutes we’re hustled by one form or another of the commercial shill.

We’ve even seen what the ‘80s have done to the world of fine art, where the who’s-hot-who’s-not publicity whiplash has hurled the artist into neo-, proto-, retro-, post-modern and deconstructivist categories that collapse before their descriptive paint has dried. Where once the young artist’s eye was drawn towards the literal fulfillment of his esthetic impulse, now his disingenuous gaze is drawn wall-eyed towards the marketplace, and of course the marketplace’s surrogate, celebrity. And what’s become of jazz, our old metaphor for the unruly iner life? Pianist Ross Tompkins has a word for it: Fuzak.

Enter the new comedian, our psychic ombudsman, our self-styled foreign correspondent posted in the maelstrom of current events, finding the deeper sense in them through the whacked out prism of nonsense, and telling it like it is (Emily Levine says that when she was a kid she dreamed of becoming the Oracle of Delphi).

The traditional stand-up comics were principally entertainers in minstrel shows, burlesque, vaudeville, the borscht belt and the big nightclubs. They were our Heet’s Liniment for social and marital discord.

In the modern era, the true comedian is an anti-hero, and a dangerous person. One of “Punchline’s” virtues is its depiction of a comedian perpetually on the edge of not only losing his touch but his mind, of falling out on stage into a snakepit of uncontrollable anger and pain. That’s the legacy bequeathed by Lenny Bruce, the patron saint of the modern comic.

Nobody flopped with a more spectacular crash than Bruce, the brilliance of whose descent lit up a whole sensibility. He was part Rimbaud, part jive, low-class junkie who carried some very mediocre stuff into his act. Bruce wasn’t the only one who talked dirty in his time, but he was the only one to convert dirt into a metaphor for shaking out the puritanical and racial hypocrisy that frosts America’s DNA--especially in the ‘50s. He gave out the self-immolating glow of what was then called the hipster, and at the end, the memorable shriek of the martyr.

After Bruce, stand-up looked comparatively easy. It was like city officials putting up a traffic light at an intersection after someone has been killed. Of the two other major comedic influences of the time, the Second City improv company out of Chicago demanded too much by way of theatrical skill, and such is the formidable native intelligence and intuition of Mort Sahl that he could have no disciples.

It’s amazing how much of Bruce’s influence remains. Sex and drugs and foul language are still the staples of most comedians’ acts. But there’s been a major change. Bruce and so many of his generation, were believers. In his case the belief was in justice and the redemptive forgiveness for telling the truth as you saw it. For him, that belief became ensnarled in the great spaghetti tufts of audio tape he threw up in self-defense as he slipped into paranoia and the all-encompassing, all-forgiving embrace of drugs. For the rest of us not so caught up, the belief ripened in the Kennedy years through the post-pubescent hopes of the Baby Boomers. But Kennedy was killed. Then there was Vietnam. Then we had Watergate. Then we elected a Teflon President to ward off the evil glow of our “malaise.”

Albert Camus wrote of the modern world--particularly the war-torn 20th Century--as a world of inverted values. But for a long time America, in a kind of psychological enactment of the Monroe Doctrine, managed to stay out of it; the coming of age of its disaffection therefore had the added wallop of the delayed reaction. In the meantime TV and advertising seeped through the social strata with their insidious message that virtually everything in life has a sales value, that no symbol of love or hope or innocence or joy can’t be converted into a promotional consideration.

At the edge of this rising rubble of trash-cult stands the lone comedian, a psychologically frail figure, as “Punchline” observes, whose subverted drive is no longer the fulfillment of a talent to amuse, but to achieve celebrity. Valhalla is five minutes on Johnny Carson and then on to that cushy TV sitcom. As Mort Sahl observed, “People don’t worry about selling out anymore; they worry about buying in.”

One of “Punchline’s” concluding shots is of a lineup of club comedians on stage awaiting the verdict of who among them will get a spot on Carson. They stand in a dark blue sepulchral light, looking grim and stressed out; and not a little grotesque. Except for Tom Hanks, the improvisatory hipster, and Sally Field, the chirpy housewife, they’re small-timers battling dread to an uneasy draw.

“Punchline” was conceived 10 years ago--that’s how long it took Director Seltzer to get it on screen--and there are some unavoidable omissions or at least missed angles. The movie isn’t empowered to show, for example, how self-cannibalizing stand-up comedy has become, how small-minded and ingrown. Almost everyone comes out now with the same point of view on the same subject--dating, fast food chains, airplanes, Republicans and “Hey, thank you, you’ve been a great audience.” Most of our contemporary stand-ups, including David Letterman, are locked into an attitude of derision whose terms are incomprehensible to them.

They’re jammed in the same empty cul-de-sac, with audiences filling up behind them. Some great ones are still out there, but the majority of the younger comedians find safety in the ironic emptiness of their trivial pursuits. In the post-modern temper, disbelief has turned to unbelief--we’ve been sold out too many times and at too many levels--and there’s nothing the comedian as truth teller can do about it by way of liberating us, or offering us a distinctive point of view. That’s why Sam Kinison has caught on; the psychological Zeitgeist now is the primal scream. Words are too ineffectual.

In real life, the Tom Hanks character would never win the contest, as he does (by default) in “Punchline.” He’s too spikey and unpredictable for the Carson format, which is designed to put us to bed after the rigors of the 11 o’clock news. And Sally Field’s wholesome Lilah Kritsick wouldn’t last 10 minutes in the clubs once she got her act smoothed out. She’s too pert for the low sexual bear-baiting of the clubs. She’d land a sitcom right away; Lilah would grow up to be Sally Fields.

The poignancy of “Punchline” is indirect. In “A Chorus Line,” we saw a group of people anguish and triumph only to wind up doing Broadway’s same old song and dance. In “Punchline,” we see them struggle much the same way, only to wind up telling the same dumb joke.