A Witty Warning About ‘Dumbth’ Trend : Humor: In his own words, comedian Steve Allen expounds on the idea that America is losing its smarts.

What is the world coming to? A lot of Americans do not know where Mexico is. They think Delaware is a city. Asked to name a tribe that has invaded England, they answer, “The Aztecs.” They ask actor Robert Young for medical advice, just because he played Dr. Marcus Welby on television, and they write letters to Kentucky Derby winners.

“Not the jockey, not the trainer, but the horse,” said an incredulous Steve Allen.

With a look of inspired mystification, the veteran comedian-author-songwriter paused in his description, bolstered by studies and personal experiences, of creeping dumbness in America to picture somebody actually writing a letter to a horse. “Something like, ‘Dear Seabiscuit . . . . Thanks for winning the Kentucky Derby. I won 28 bucks on you. Keep up the good work . . .’ ”

The Caltech audience chortled appreciatively.

“The American people are dumber now than they have been in a very long time,” said Allen, who has written a book called “Dumbth” on the subject.

Allen, 68, has come a long way since he commanded a squad of wacky characters in the NBC studios in New York, on the original “The Tonight Show.” In those days, more than 30 years ago, the bespectacled host might have traded gibes with some New Jersey cheerleaders in the audience, hooked himself up to a vibrating girth-reducing machine or chatted amiably with entertainers Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, before diving into a nine-foot vat of Jell-O.

But this is the Beckman, Caltech’s airy, wedding cake-shaped auditorium. The antic “Steverino” (as one character on “The Tonight Show” used to call him) of the 1950s and 1960s seems to have given way in this sedate hall to a pleasant, thoughtful social critic. He was in Pasadena to talk about a deterioration of basic intelligence in America.

“Dumbth” (Allen’s own term) is a spreading incompetence, illiteracy and gullibility across the land. “It’s a combination of ignorance and stupidity, plus some unidentified ingredients,” he said.

There were not any New Jersey cheerleaders present on this occasion. The sold-out audience of 1,164 was mostly middle-aged--many of them scientists, teachers and technicians--with enough concentrated brain power to turn out an encyclopedia in two hours flat.

Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel laureate in physics, sat in the same row with Paul MacCready, the visionary inventor of a human-powered airplane and solar-powered car. Caltech faculty and members of Southern California Skeptics, co-sponsor of the event and recipient of its proceeds, jammed the center of the auditorium.

Somehow or other, though, the laughs just kept bubbling up from somewhere in Allen’s restless psyche.

He handled some written questions from the audience, talking about the sources of his inspiration (he doesn’t know what they are), his syndicated show “Host to Host,” shown locally on KABC-TV, and the things that make him laugh (Dan Quayle).

“As a group, you’re a little on the flaky side,” he said, riffling through a stack of question cards. He read one of them. “ ‘What is a semiconductor?’ I’ll give you a definition by example. I would say Lawrence Welk.”

Another one, purportedly from Jesus Morales of Tijuana, asked: “If Jesus was Jewish, how come he had a Mexican name?”

Then he did what he always appeared most comfortable doing on stage (or screen)--noodling on the Steinway while gabbing into a microphone. “Every few years, there’s a hit song or two in which the singer’s heart is breaking because something reminds him of a lost love,” Allen said, playing a few bars of “These Foolish Things.” “But why is it that nobody writes about the bad memories?”

Somebody has, of course. Allen launched into his own version of the 1936 standard. “A greasy meatball that’s all cold and moldy . . . A stupid song that’s now a golden oldie . . . “

The audience responded as delightedly as if it were 1956 and they had all traveled on a lark to the television studio at Rockefeller Center, taking the bus through the Lincoln Tunnel or riding the subway in from Brooklyn--which some of them, at earlier times in their lives, actually had done.

“I was raised on Steve Allen,” retired physics professor Herb Segall, a transplanted New Yorker, said after the show. “He was spontaneous, he was witty . . . “

Actually, Allen, an owlish man in a plaid jacket, long ago staked a claim on the affections of the thinking public. Besides his late-night television hi-jinks, he has written books, scores for musicals, hit songs and a play, “The Wake,” which won a Los Angeles drama critics’ nomination as the best play of 1977.

Many of those who snapped up the tickets for Allen’s performance at the Beckman remembered him most fondly for creating and hosting the PBS-TV series “Meeting of Minds,” in which historical figures like Galileo, Cleopatra, Darwin, Ulysses S. Grant and Marie Antoinette talked and debated about international issues.

“I was always serious, but people didn’t know about it,” Allen said. “If you do a comic monologue, you may be seen by 27 million people, whereas, if you write a serious book or a serious song, you may be home along with a tape recorder or a piano.”