STAGE REVIEW : Humor Wears Thin in ‘Greater Tuna’ at Westwood Playhouse

“Vacation in Texas--and see why it’s like visiting a whole other country.”

This was the first commercial message I heard from my car radio as I drove home from “Greater Tuna” at the Westwood Playhouse Wednesday. It almost could have been part of the show.

The denizens of Tuna, Texas’ third smallest town, are definitely different from you or me. This is not an affectionate tribute to our common humanity. It’s a cartoon that depicts Tunans as intellectually and spiritually blighted folk who deserve nothing more than a few guffaws.

They get those guffaws in “Greater Tuna.” For those who have never seen Joe Sears and Jaston Williams playing 10 Tunans apiece, in the show they co-wrote with director Ed Howard, that may be enough.

However, for those who already saw Sears and Williams do their show at Las Palmas Theatre in 1984, or at one of their other venues around the country or on Home Box Office, another visit to “Greater Tuna” may seem more like “Lesser Tuna.”

On second viewing, admiration for the performances, the costumes and the wigs gives way to impatience with the thinness of the writing and the supercilious quality of the laughter that results from such a shallow script.

Not that the performances, costumes and wigs have slipped. Sears plays the big movers and shakers of Tuna, while Williams plays the little whiners, and neither of them indicates that this is their umpteenth time around the track with these characters.

The two of them are funniest in drag. Williams endows the gun-hawking Didi Snavely with a ragged, nobody-knows-the-trouble-I’ve-seen voice; sighs magnificently as teen-aged Charlene Bumiller, who’s traumatized over not making cheerleader; and minces majestically as Vera Carp, vice president of the Smut Snatchers.

Sears’ Bertha Bumiller is the most rock-solid characterization on stage, despite (or because of?) the mismatch between her girth and that sickly-green pantsuit she wears. His Aunt Pearl is a not-so-distant relative of Jonathan Winters’ Aunt Maude.

Linda Fisher’s costumes are still a hoot, if hardly unexpected. For example, old Aunt Pearl wears lots of pearls, even on the hottest day of the summer, even as she goes about poisoning dogs in order to protect her chickens. R.R. Snavely (Sears again), who witnessed an unidentified flying chalupa, has a belly that will never stop sticking out from behind his denims. Vera’s little hat looks like it, too, might be an unidentified flying object.

There’s a disdainful quality to most of the laughter this show provokes. The bigotry and narrow-mindedness of the Tunans and their ghastly fashions will allow enlightened Westsiders to congratulate themselves for not living in small towns. This is the cheapest kind of satire--it makes its audience more comfortable.

The writers hardly bothered with hypocrisy, which should be a mother lode for small-town humor. For example, the title of a winning school essay is “Human Rights: Why Bother?” This gets a quick laugh, but it would have been a richer joke if the essay praised values that the writer’s behavior then mocked.

The only slight exception to the detachment we feel toward these people is with Bertha. In the big city, people have to cope with impossible children just as Bertha does. But some of our connection with her derives from hearing her admit that life isn’t so rosy in Tuna. In other words, even Bertha confirms our prejudices.

The show doesn’t sound updated. When Bertha discusses books that should be removed from the library, her first targets are “Roots” and “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee”--’70s books that would probably have been replaced by fresher targets by now. While a change on this level would be superficial, at least it might give this “Tuna” a sharper hook.

At 10886 Le Conte Ave., Tuesdays through Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 6 and 9 p.m., Sundays at 3 and 7 p.m., indefinitely. $17.50-$25; (213) 410-1062.