COMEDY REVIEW : Goldthwait Celebrates His Rite of Torment at Wiltern Theater

Fuse-cracked, screechingly taut and viscid from the violent affect of some unnamed apocalyptic assault on his nervous system, Bob Goldthwait spent years entertaining audiences with the self-immolating specter of an impending on-stage psychotic collapse.

His act was a pure masochistic frenzy. It touched a majority of people--the silent majority--who had more than an inkling that modern life is out of control, like a hot busted telephone wire crackling in front of traffic--one pop onto your hood and you’re charcoal. He performed one of the historic functions of the artist in that he showed the way you may or may not want to go. The extremity of his state made his grateful audiences feel safer, more centered. As bad as it is, we thought, it hasn’t made us this bad.

The question about Goldthwait, like Sam Kinison and his primal scream, was in how far he could go with that act. He wasn’t a conventional entertainer. He didn’t exactly tell jokes. He wasn’t reassuringly show-bizzy. Once the novelty wore off, would he join the mass graveyard of used-up comedians?

Goldthwait made an appearance at the Wiltern Theater on Saturday night and demonstrated that his intuitive rite of torment has a conscious and social base after all, and that it isn’t just a manic expression of the depressingly limited range between infantilism and teen Angst that’s been a staple of our pop scene for so long.

Goldthwait is no wit, and his reflections are still splintered in keeping with his battered and tormented personality. But, together, like the jabbing of expressionistic impulses, they do convey a deeper and--surprisingly--more humane reach into our experience, our feeling of betrayal at the hands of officialdom, our knowledge of the violence percolating around us (“I’m glad you don’t do that ‘Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!’ ” he told the audience. “It’s so close to ‘Heil! Heil! Heil!’ ”).

He still comes on with that choking cough that sounds like someone trying to dislodge a fur-ball caught in the throat. He pulls at his thinning hair, and refers to himself variously as fat and bald and obscenity-spewing and a troll--the audience’s psychic pumice. And not all of his stuff is inspired--who can really joke about Dan Quayle, the man who recently apologized to a Latin American audience for his poor knowledge of Latin?

But he’s refreshingly unsympathetic to the new fascism infiltrating the comedy scene. He answers an anti-black, anti-gay album (“Guns N’ Roses”) with a parody of a tough beating up on a gay--”You’re kind of attractive, you know? I’d like to help you, but I can’t come out of the closet.” To the rise of women-bashing in stand-up spearheaded by Sam Kinison, he observes: “If all the women you’ve dated need to form a support group, maybe (it’s you).”

Commercialism (“I find it hard to believe that John Lennon wrote ‘Revolution’ for a sneaker ad”), political duplicity and machismo’s self-doubt drowned in the throttling of a Trans Am are some of Goldthwait’s targets. And if Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” makes a perfect coda for the Reagan years, Goldthwait takes a baseball bat and smashes in the TV screen on which the McFerrin video so ingenuously smiles. A fitting gesture for an era in which words have come to mean so little--when their meaning isn’t upended altogether.

Goldthwait closes with a skillful parody of the rock group U-2 singing the songs of the Village People. At last, someone willing to demonstrate rock’s extraordinary capacity for pretentiousness! Goldthwait is a true comedian.