O.C. POP MUSIC REVIEW : Newman in Twaining for Humor Greatness : Coach House turn shows the songwriter, with a little makeup, could give Samuel Langhorne Clemens a run for his money.

That splotchy, reddish-orange shirt, fit for baseball bleacher wear, won’t do, but the curly hair is a start.

Finding a dapper white suit shouldn’t be too hard. Maybe whiten those curls while we’re at it. The mustache could take a while to grow. At least he already knows how to talk Southern. Would he choke if we had him puff on a cigar?

What we’re considering here is a makeover for Randy Newman--from well-respected but overlooked pop song craftsman to . . . a new version of that old barnstorming satirist, humorist and storyteller, Mark Twain.

One thing Newman doesn’t have to change is the quality and slant of his material. After 23 years of some of the highest-grade songwriting in pop, he has enough good stuff stashed under his piano bench to do a great-American-humorist turn, complete with sure-fire laugh lines, insight into America’s potential and failings, moral outrage that deflates priggish pretentiousness and scathes bigotry, and an array of memorable characters and yarns.

At the Coach House Friday night, Newman did just fine being himself, splotchy shirt and all. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s 100-minute show was comfortable and relaxed. Newman tossed out quips, sometimes parenthetically between song lines, and established a close connection with an audience that knew when to be responsive, when to be quietly attentive, and when to be demanding.

One of the demands was for a sampling of Newman’s work-in-progress, a musical based on the Faust legend. Newman demurred for a moment, then launched into an infectiously enthusiastic sing-and-tell synopsis of the play’s opening scenes. From the sound of it, this is going to be a farcical Faust. God, harried and testy, makes his grand entrance; then the devil comes a-calling at the heavenly gates to chat with his buddy the Lord about the souls he’s been stealing. One of them belongs to a 13-year-old St. Louis girl who is “the cutest little muffin you have seen.”

Newman apologized because the music he has written for actors hasn’t been molded to his own vocal range yet, but he promised to come back and perform the whole show at the Coach House in the future.

It was telling that the devil’s encounter with this muffin takes place in the Chase Hotel in St. Louis. The place itself isn’t really important, but Newman’s insistence on detail is a key to his success in creating songs and personages that stick in the mind.

It served him well on a wide range of material. There were the purely comic numbers, like the shout-along “I Love L.A.” and “A Wedding in Cherokee County,” which he delivered with supreme timing, drawing a fresh laugh every few syllables.

At the opposite end of Newman’s spectrum were his straightforward, empathizing looks at people in pain. “Real Emotional Girl” and “Bad News From Home” were subtle, heartbroken songs that seemed like moments isolated from a larger story.

That capacity for warmth tends to be overshadowed by Newman’s satiric salvos at far less sympathetic figures. Satire was the main current running through a show that, with an intermission in the middle, was well-designed to establish a mood or theme, then change it before sameness could set in. Newman’s splendid career recapitulation drew upon seven of his eight studio albums. He ignored his fine 1968 debut, sang two songs from “12 Songs,” seven from “Sail Away” and six from “Good Old Boys” (probably his two best), three from Little Criminals, one from the sub-par “Born Again,” four from “Trouble in Paradise” and five from “Land of Dreams.” He added “I Love to See You Smile,” from the “Parenthood” soundtrack, plus two songs from his Faust musical.

Newman, who lived in Louisiana as a child and set several of the “Good Old Boys” and “Land of Dreams” songs there, could have made much of the ascendancy of David Duke. But overtly topical commentary would have been superfluous. In songs like “Roll With the Punches,” from his last album, 1988’s “Land of Dreams,” Newman already had punctured attitudes and ideology similar to the ones that have brought a racist politician into close contention for a governorship. Naming names, in this case, would only have narrowed the song’s broader truth.

There is a sense of defeat in Newman’s satires against bigotry. “Christmas in Capetown,” with its hammering, compulsive piano chords and soured holiday airs, foretold disaster before racist attitudes can change. The show-closing “Sail Away,” probably Newman’s greatest song, was a moving account of fallen American ideals. The music, grand and ceremonially reverent, evokes an America full of promise. But as he speaks, the song’s narrator happens to be transporting African slaves to this supposedly free new world.

If “Christmas in Capetown” and “Sail Away” presented Newman’s irony at its deepest, a number of songs poking fun at smaller but deliciously wrongheaded targets let him have the most fun. He had a particularly gleeful time with the smug, rich boor of “My Life Is Good.” While we are meant to condemn this bullying egotist, we’re also meant to find in him a larger-than-life figure whose colorful haughtiness we can perversely enjoy. It’s fitting that Newman is writing a musical revolving around the devil, because he has always had a knack for giving his devils their due.