‘Hairspray’s’ Waters Masters the All-Irony Show at Bogart’s

Ironically enough--heh heh--the new issue of Spy magazine with a trenchant cover essay on the Irony Epidemic arrived in local mailboxes Thursday, just in time for an all-irony live show that night at Bogart’s in Long Beach.

This lineup at the rock club was close to some kind of godhead for the snickering generation. Headlining was notoriously distasteful film director John Waters (“Hairspray,” “Polyester”), making a stop on his “lecture tour” to discuss his fascination with drag queens, mass murderers and Joey Heatherton, among other subjects.

Also on the smirk-heavy bill: the Del Rubio Triplets, three women well into middle age who appropriate recent pop hits for their own slightly off-key purposes, and Lovingkindness, a purposefully abominable local group whose idea of a good time is a sub-garage rock version of “Alfie.”

Amid this Irony Epidemic, Waters is a unique figure in that he bridges the old, more dangerous camp (which has it that everything is funny if it’s somehow made perverse) and the new, safer camp (which has it that everything is funny if it’s retro ‘50s or ‘60s).

As a director, he’s still best known for having his house transvestite, the late Divine, devour dog excrement in “Pink Flamingos,” and his fascination with the morbid and/or deviant remains unbounded. “My hobby is extreme Catholic behavior before the Reformation,” he said Thursday.

Waters--offering half an hour of stand-up comedy followed by half an hour of questions from the worshipful audience--also expressed his fondness for censored Japanese porn films, in which a black optical ball is placed strategically over the naughty bits: “It’s great, because it makes the film dirtier than it ever was.”

But rather than revel in the anything-goes late ‘80s, Waters seems to pine for an earlier, more innocent era--not, heaven knows, because it was more innocent, but because trivia was more trivial then, because silly things could run wild, run free.

He spoke with fondness of “The Howdy Doody Show,” of consulting those fortunetelling 8-ball toys for advice on whether to obey his parents, of wanting to disfigure himself after idolizing Captain Hook in “Peter Pan.” He described his most recent film, the novelty-song-filled “Hairspray,” as being “about how much fun music used to be before the Beatles ruined it.”

Geraldo Rivera came in for no little excoriation, not because his talk show is exploitative--Waters loves every seedy subject covered therein--but because Rivera won’t admit that it’s exploitative.

Waters derided religious broadcaster James Dobson for selling tapes of his eleventh-hour interview with Ted Bundy, but congratulated the Weekly World News tabloid for printing a photo of Bundy’s corpse: “Any society that believes in capital punishment deserves that.” The only sin worth Waters’ wrath, it seems, is hypocrisy.

The director’s jibes are generally on-target, and you sense that behind the trademark pencil-thin mustache and wide striped tie from hell lies a gentle soul less obsessed with true perversity than brazenness in its most unassuming forms.

But those not yet addicted to what Spy calls “Camp Lite” (or “kitsch glut”) may feel that Waters’ occasional moral outrage doesn’t quite cut it in the vacuum of a greater good. It’s an amusing religion, but do we really want to worship at the shrine of Connie Francis?

If Waters straddles the fence between two kinds of camp, so do the Del Rubio Triplets: Once upon a time, at least, when they made their living on the retirement-home circuit, the trio was what Spy magazine calls “unwittingly hip.”

Now that they’re the darlings of the chic set, surely these ladies know that they bemuse Hollywood’s youngsters with their matching baby-blue outfits and occasionally discordant acoustic guitar playing; any act that dares do such an awful version of “Light My Fire” certainly must be “wittingly hip.”

Yet, even as they knowingly court laughs with songs such as “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” the Del Rubios haven’t lost all their innocence. There’s a folkish purity in their version of “Neutron Dance” that the Pointer Sisters couldn’t even begin to approach; it takes a real arranging talent to make a modern dance hit legitimately sound like a relic from Elvis’ “Sun Sessions.” A fine irony, there.

LIVE ACTION: Poison will be at the Los Angeles Sports Arena on April 7 and at the Pacific Amphitheatre on April 8. Both shows are on sale now. . . . Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg and Robin Williams are teaming again to host the all-star Comic Relief III homeless benefit at the Universal Amphitheatre on March 18. Tickets are on sale Sunday. . . . Randy Newman will give solo concerts March 31 at the Ventura Theatre and April 12 at the Coach House. . . . Also on sale Sunday for the Universal Amphitheatre is Reba McEntire on March 25. . . . Stryper’s postponed Universal show has been rescheduled for March 10. . . . John Prine will be at the Coach House on April 21-23.