COMEDY REVIEW : British Comic Henry Suffers Cultural Jet Lag

The Bravo Cable System has launched a nationwide campaign to introduce Lenny Henry, a black comedian from England, to American audiences. But the company has been so protective of its new client, both in his videocassette promo and his single West Coast appearance at Crackers Restaurant and Comedy Club in Anaheim, that he’s come and gone without leaving much of a trace.

At 30, Jamaican-born Henry has co-starred with Tracey Ullman on British TV’s “Three of a Kind,” as well as a number of shows. Two of them, “The Lenny Henry Show” and “Lenny Henry Tonite,” have been running for five years on the BBC. Every outward indication is that he’s a major British talent; he’s even been touted as England’s answer to Eddie Murphy.

The comparison is overdrawn. Murphy is a lousy stand-up comedian, but he’s a brilliant character actor. Henry’s people (of whom we saw only a couple) are not as sharply drawn, and his stand-up routine falls into that generic Interzone that characterizes stand-up everywhere when it sacrifices point of view for the easy laugh.

Henry is a powerfully built 6-footer with a heavy Paul Robeson voice who, in his appearance at Crackers this week, wore a pinstripe suit with stripes so wide they looked like a parody.

He talked about what it is to be black with an English accent; about 17th-Century British blacks wishing the departing Pilgrims well and hoping more whites would join them. He joked about chasing scared white folks on New York’s 42nd Street. He did an evangelical preacher. (“Say ‘Ah!’ Say ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ Say ‘Get down, you funky sex machine.’ ”)

He talked about the Flintstones in the White House, not realizing that evangelical jokes and Reagan jokes have been pretty well used up by now. He spoke about how much more clever women are than men. (“When we were outside playing marbles, they were inside watching ‘People’s Court’ and ‘Perry Mason’ and taking notes.”)

As soul singer Theophilus P. Wildebeest, he played up the old Barry White stereotype of the black super-stud. (“I’m so sexy, I got up in the morning, went to my dresser, and my underwear said, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ ”) He brought up an attractive woman from the audience, and played a bit of his routine off her. Then he was gone.

There’s an awful lot a foreign comedian can bring us by way of cultural perspective--or even ethnic idiosyncrasy--that an American comedian cannot, and the British Isles have furnished us with a number of bright talents over the years--Scotland’s Billy Carrol comes to mind. But Henry is clearly in search of an American success on American terms instead of his own, which means he played with sitcom rhythms and attitudes and the ingrown club references that have poisoned so much of the club scene here.

Henry has a strong presence, but his routine seemed culturally jet-lagged, out of focus. If Bravo had let him settle in for an hour or so, we might have seen what all the promo fuss has been about. But he was gone before we had a chance to see anything out of the ordinary.