‘Howard Stern Show’ Makes You Laugh While You Gag : Television: Radio’s shock jock brings a raw, gross, vile and funny hour to late-night audiences.

Only the the thinnest of smiles softened Anthony Quinn’s face and, amazingly, he remained composed.

Emerging from a posh Manhattan restaurant one night, this distinguished screen actor, this winner of two Academy Awards, this Zorba the Greek, for heaven’s sake, had been ambushed on the street by a strange, nervous, long-haired young man with a television crew and had been asked, point-blank:

“Does it bother you when people speak to you when you’re on the bowl?”

Soon came the still-tougher follow-up question:

“If you had your choice, would you rather have someone pick your nose or suck your ear wax out with a straw?”

Only one person--John Melendez, better known as “Stuttering John”--would dare ask such in-depth questions, and only one show would put him up to it.

Yes, you were watching far-and-away the grossest hour on television, the series that makes Fox’s “Married . . . With Children” and “In Living Color” look like “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the unrivaled Leatherface of late-night, none other than “The Howard Stern Show.”

This is no show, this is an enema.

Hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot, hoot.

Playing to minuscule audiences at midnight Saturdays on KCOP Channel 13, “The Howard Stern Show” is the outer edge of conventional TV. It’s at once incredibly funny and incredibly vile, a video son of Stern’s raunchy and popular morning radio show on Manhattan’s WXRK-FM, with his sidekick Robin Quivers and little Howdie Doodies--Melendez, Jackie (The Jokeman) Martling, Fred Norris and Gary Dell’Abate--performing like his puppets.

Although Stern is smart and very quick, it’s those calculatingly absurd Melendez interviews--like the one with the tolerant Quinn--that bring the syndicated show its moments of brilliant lunacy.

There was Melendez on the street on another occasion, clumsily shuffling his sheaf of questions while earnestly asking New York gossip columnist Cindy Adams about the bowel habits of her elderly comic husband, Joey. She fled to their car, dragging the confused Joey with her.

There was Melendez supposedly searching for Eddie Murphy, running after every black man he saw on the street (“Eddie? Eddie?”).

There he was crashing a party given by Morton Downey Jr., asking late-night’s former prince of darkness: “When they remove your warts, do you save them in a pickle jar?”

A brawl--a seemingly real one with people falling all over the place--ensued.

Anyone who regularly trashes hammy Richard Simmons and that ragman Mr. Blackwell, as Stern does, can’t be all bad. But if you inhale too deeply while watching “The Howard Stern Show,” you may pass out. Like its 36-year-old star--the snide, lewd, insulting, utterly tasteless and most shocking of all of radio’s “shock jocks”--this is the kind of show you either laugh at or gag at.

Recently I gagged.

That came during last Saturday’s hour, when Stern grabbed, squeezed and roughly massaged comic Judy Tenuta’s rear end as if he were kneading dough (“Look how tight! Look how tight! Look how tight!”). Later, while costumed to look like a couple of Goodyear Blimps, Stern and Tenuta savaged Roseanne Barr and Barr’s husband, Tom Arnold, in a sketch. Stern--while stuffing his mouth and Tenuta’s with food--renamed Barr and Arnold “fat Roseanne and her fat, disgusting husband.” Then, apparently fearing he’d been too subtle, he called them both “fat, disgusting slobs.” Meanwhile, Tenuta kept eating food and waddling to the toilet.

She couldn’t have found a more appropriate metaphor for much of Stern’s show. Just how noxious does it get?

Imagine a show repeatedly ridiculing the prominent teeth and gums of one of its cast members (Dell’Abate), having him either cover his mouth with a scarf or mechanical apparatus or wear a device that allows Stern to spray his teeth with water at will.

Imagine a show that makes fun of the stuttering speech of another member of its cast. That’s Melendez, dubbed “Stuttering John”--or, more recently, “you stuttering baboon”--by Stern. When Melendez starts stuttering on the set, Stern has Norris sit by his side and mimic him.

You can hardly believe you’re watching what you’re watching. And if that weren’t bizarre enough, during every episode, Channel 13 runs a public-service announcement with the prepubescent star of the syndicated series “Small Wonder” urging viewers not to laugh at stutterers:

“People who stutter have trouble getting the words out. It hurts them when others laugh. They also don’t like being interrupted or having someone fill in their words.”

Very nice. But these pearls are undermined by the very show that surrounds them.

The National Stuttering Project “asked us to run their public-service announcement during the show and present another point of view, so we’re doing it,” said KCOP president and general manager Bill Frank.

The public-service spot came from the stuttering project’s media relations coordinator, Ira Zimmerman, who is irate over the jokes about Melendez.

“This is a clear example of exploiting a handicapped person for humorous purposes,” said Zimmerman, adding that his protests to MCA, which owns WOR, the New York station where Stern’s series is produced, have gone unanswered.

“This show demonstrates the worst kind of behavior,” Zimmerman said. “It’s a stutterer’s nightmare.”

Not Melendez’s nightmare, though. Like the toothy Dell’Abate, Melendez not only goes along with being ridiculed, he even appears to encourage it and find it hilarious, loving his celebrity and proudly labeling himself a “kamikaze stuttering interviewer.”

Is someone a victim if he willingly abets his tormentor?

“If it was just me, I would feel offended,” Melendez said by phone from New York, where he also plays in a rock band. “But Howard makes fun of Fred’s belly button and Gary’s big teeth and bad breath, and he makes fun of his own big nose. He makes fun of everyone.”

A 25-year-old graduate of New York University and no fool, Melendez doesn’t have to do the show. But he has no plans to quit. Instead of harming fellow stutterers, moreover, Melendez claims he’s helping them and removing a stigma by allowing his own disability to become the butt of jokes. “The first fan letter I ever got was from a stutterer thanking me for making it a lot easier for him,” Melendez said.

Meanwhile, I requested an interview with Stern, but was told he was too busy. What a shame. I wanted to ask him about his scar--the one from the lobotomy.