COMEDY REVIEW : Finding the Enemy Is a Laugh : Show: Comic prods the audience to think as he scouts out enemies, real and imagined.

Bill Hicks does more than take the stage. He takes over the stage. He takes over the audience. He paces, he shouts, he cackles, he cajoles. He intimidates, and he smokes a lot.

He does all this in his effort to find the enemy. He is concerned about the enemy.

“We gotta find an enemy,” he says several times throughout the 65-minute show at the Improv on Tuesday night.

But exactly who or what that enemy is, we’re never sure. Society? Hypocrisy? He hints, but he never tells.

Constantly pacing, constantly throwing out thoughts, he tries almost as much to nick a social conscience as he tries for laughs.

He asks the audience to think, or at least to consider, what’s going on around them. What’s good? What’s bad? What’s hypocritical?

Are cigarettes bad? Are drugs bad? Is alcohol bad? If they are, why aren’t cigarettes and alcohol illegal, too? Maybe, he wonders aloud, because they are taxed vices and contribute to better roads?

“It’s OK to drink your drugs, but not untaxed drugs,” he points out.

At other times during the intense set, sex is the enemy. Rock ‘n’ roll is the enemy. Drugs are the enemy. So many enemies, but so few solutions. Think, people, think, he urges as he lashes complacency.

Part of Hicks’ success stems from his ability to get the audience to suspend reality and follow him on the serpentine ride through his thought processes to make a point. He takes a light look at drunk driving and those roadside sobriety tests. An audition for freedom, he calls them. The crowd reacts warmly. It knows what he is talking about.

Hicks, who honed his material in Houston with “Texas Outlaw Comics, which also turned out Sam Kinison--starts the act with innocuous little observations, like what it is like to see smokers in Chicago when the weather is 10 below zero. “It’s fun watching smokers pass out because they didn’t know when they were done exhaling.”

Or when he asks one man how much he smokes a day. “Half a pack,” the man replies.

“Hell,” Hicks says, “I go through two lighters a day.”

He eases into the message portion of the show, putting harder edges on his observations.

But later, sensing that the roughly 240 people in the room are tiring of his pontificating, he comes right out and puts it even more succinctly. “I know. We came to forget our problems. But I’m here to make you deal with it.”

In one particularly biting observation, he uses rock ‘n’ roll to underscore what he considers society’s sometimes ludicrous workings. He points to a recent trial in Reno in which the heavy-metal band Judas Priest was absolved of guilt in the suicide of two teen-age fans who prosecutors claimed were driven to the act by the band’s lyrics.

He has little compassion. Music wasn’t the problem, he says, maybe the victims were responsible and nobody else is to blame. Case closed.

“This just means there are two less gas-station attendants in the world. We didn’t lose the cure for cancer here.”

How ludicrous can this whole scenario be, he wonders. “What rock group wants to kill its fans” and give up the money and limousines to go back to their day jobs?

Bill Hicks, who has appeared several times on “Late Night With David Letterman” as well as on HBO and Showtime, continues his “Dangerous” tour (named after his new album) at the Improv in Pacific Beach through Sunday. Opening acts are Ed Crasnick and Bob Kubota.