COMEDY REVIEW : Comic Curbs the Salsa in His Humor

The running joke in New York’s Catskill Mountains is that tourists go there to eat . . . and eat, and that the comedians are more of an after-dinner mint.

Paul Rodriguez would not fit in back there. He is definitely a main course.

Sunday night he played three sold-out shows at Oceanside’s Comedy Nite club, which also serves up food with comedians, but the comics take top billing over the bagels and blintzes.

And where the Catskills feature Jewish ethnic, Rodriguez features Mexican ethnic, but not in the same portions as earlier in his career, and not with the same bite. A kinder, gentler routine.

Gone is the gag he took a lot of heat for when he would appear on stage with a bandanna around his head while brandishing an oversized switchblade he called “The Mexican Express Card.” No jokes in his 50-minute show were quite so cutting.

That doesn’t mean, however, that he has totally abandoned ethnic material.

Moments after a loud welcome by about 260 fans, he kidded a Latino heckler about how, after two Coronas, he suddenly became Caucasian. Then, in no particular order, he ran over Southerners, Vietnamese, Caucasians, Frankenstein, ugly people, bald people, bad dancers and Janet Jackson. He has something for everyone now.

Rodriguez’s act might be R-rated, but barely. He used the ‘F’ word only once. And most raunchiness, to his credit, was in passing, not the main thrust.

Even when he described a vision of his mother having sex with his father, it wasn’t tawdry. Rodriguez is writhing with his back to the brick wall and yelling, “Oh, yes! I want to have your future lottery winner!”

The crowd was not a tough one, and the comedian handled the situation accordingly. He was polite to hecklers (using the term loosely), and anyone who dared to shout also dared to become part of his act. He would stray from his routine until that interruption had run its course and then return easily to his banter.

Rodriguez also flitted easily between English and Spanish, meaning that if a listener’s Spanish is limited to “Hola, que tal?” he or she is going to miss a few jokes. Most of the ethnically diverse crowd, however, didn’t miss many jokes, on such topics as:

* Dancing: “Must be a weird sight for deaf people.”

* How hot it was on the stage: “I’m sweating more than Mike Tyson at a spelling test.” * Ghosts: “You don’t see many ethnic ghosts. Housing must be a bitch in the afterlife, too.”

* Southerners: “I’m glad to be back here. I was just in Georgia, and there’s none of my type there. They look at me like I look at “Jeopardy.” He tilts his head sideways, squinches up his nose and looks real puzzled.

Rodriguez--who relies on a blend of body moves, facial expressions and voice imitations to make his point--does not have to bang his fans over the head to get their attention or their laughs. He isn’t vicious. He doesn’t shock. He doesn’t whine and moan. He just dishes up hearty observations.

So enjoy. The last laugh is on him as he laments about people who sell religion from house to house:

“If you knock on my door at 7 a.m. Sunday after I’ve been out all night,” he says, “you better not be telling me about Jesus. You better BE Jesus.”