ART REVIEW : ‘Kovacs and Kaufman’: Getting the Picture on Comic Geniuses : Fantasy: Long Beach Museum of Art also offers ‘Magical Mystery Tour ‘89,’ a Christmas show of art rooted in fantasy to entice children’s wonder and imagination.

“I never told a joke in my life,” the late comic genius Andy Kaufman once declared. As can be seen in “Kovacs and Kaufman,” a retrospective survey of the television work of Kaufman and early video pioneer Ernie Kovacs (on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art through Jan. 7), Kaufman wasn’t kidding. Often dismissed as a tasteless vulgarian with a few screws loose, Kaufman’s comedy was in fact so revolutionary and sophisticated that no one knew what to make of it. People tended to laugh nervously at Kaufman if they laughed at all.

Best known as the lovably innocent Latka, a featured character in the TV series “Taxi,” Kaufman adopted a persona as a stand-up comic (a term that hardly encompasses what he did) that was anything but innocent. Perplexing and willfully annoying, he seemed driven to violate the rules of TV etiquette, and he got away with some amazing things on the air; he taunted women into wrestling matches, started a brawl on a variety show and panhandled David Letterman’s studio audience. Much of his material was designed to point up the questionable authenticity of the emotions engendered by television, and to confront audiences with their own expectations. In the two Kaufman specials on view here (one from 1977 and one shot in 1983 just before his death of lung cancer), we see him at the peak of his powers.

Kaufman claims never to have seen Ernie Kovacs, who died in a 1962 auto accident, but Kovacs covered much of Kaufman’s turf 20 years earlier. Like Kaufman, Kovacs didn’t tell jokes, was essentially a conceptualist, and had the soul of a mutineer. The leading provocateur of television’s Golden Age, Kovacs was the first to poke holes in the fake reality of television, and he came up with dozens of brilliantly innovative ways to wiggle out of the talking-head box and push the limits of the medium. Employing techniques revolutionary for the time--split-screens, negative images, miniaturizations--he talked to his crew while on the air, discussed the sponsors products in a candid off-the-cuff manner, drew attention to the technology of TV and barraged the audience with abstract visual non sequiturs.

Kovacs had an innate understanding of the sight-gag potential of video space, and there is very little dialogue in his comedy--he was big on choreographing weird scenes in sync with music, and employed music as a central structuring device. As with Kaufman, there’s a dark undercurrent of violence to much of Kovacs’ material, which is invariably presented as harmless silliness; the drunk magician accidentally stabs his assistant, the track star is shot by the official with the starting pistol.

Even though Kovacs’ material is 30 years old, it doesn’t seem remotely dated or quaint. With roots in Dadaism and Surrealism, it has a timeless quality, and this show should be required viewing for anyone with an interest in comedy or video.

Also on view is “The Magical Mystery Tour ‘89,” this year’s installment of the museum’s annual Christmas show celebrating art rooted in the idea fantasy. Designed to tickle the child’s sense of wonder and imagination that supposedly lurks within all of us cranky, overworked adults, this is a colorful, lighthearted show, at turns silly and strange. Showcasing work by 10 artists, it’s a charmingly unpretentious exhibition.

Ken Botto shows color photographs of surreal tableaux constructed out of miniature toys. Crowded compositions cluttered with brightly colored junk, his pictures spell fun at a glance, but in fact, they pulsate with paranoia. In “Suburbia,” for instance, we see an urban landscape grided with a row of identical houses nestled under a freeway jammed to a standstill with cars. Unfortunately, this fantasy is a dead ringer for reality.

Gilbert Lujan (a.k.a. Magu) offers “Magulandia,” a hysterically cheerful life-size tableau reminiscent of Red Grooms. In Magulandia, dogs have taken the place of people and they mimic human behavior; we see dogs strutting cool threads on the avenue, dogs driving low-rider cars. Tom Foolery employs the humble carrot for his central motif and shows several works from his Carrot Air Force, a series he’s been working on since 1979. Struck by the resemblance between the carrot and the body of an airplane, he makes highly detailed model planes (piloted by rabbits) and positions them in beautifully crafted settings.

The piece de resistance of the show is a room filled with life-size animals by various artists. Included are two bizarre hooved creatures by Ken Dawson Little, whose coats are made of dozens of pairs of shoes, two inscrutable sheep by Francois-Xavier Lalanne and Felipe Archuleta’s wooden pig (accompanied by his family), who is being kissed on the top of his porcine head by a long-necked wooden swan made by John Meyer. Also on the scene are two sleek wooden coyotes and an aluminum hawk by Gwynn Murrill (known for her gracefully crafted sculptures of animals), and a screeching bald eagle carved by an anonymous folk artist.

Karen Frimkess Wolff creates shimmering curtains made of monofilament line (plastic string) strung with tiny silver and brass bells, while Sheila Klein designs jewelry for plants and buildings. Illustrating her ideas with blow-ups of re-photographed photo montages, Klein shows us a skyscraper wearing a bracelet, a palm tree sporting an ornate earring.

Inspired by a visit to relatives who live in a Scottish castle, Slater Barron created an ornate room decked out in 18th-Century drag, whose walls are lined with ancestral portraits. Barron’s material of choice is lint which she scavenges from clothes dryers, and the portraits are executed in colored lint. All that lint sets the mind spinning, and one comes away from the piece with a vision of the artist sneaking in and out of self-service laundries.