Strong Candidates for a Joke : Politicians have brought comedians out in droves this year but keeping up with the races isn’t easy

“George Bush has a kinder, gentler health program for the nation, in three simple words: Don’t Get Sick.”

Buh-da-boom .

“Hey, if Japan wants to make better cars, fine, let them. We’ll just make better haiku.”

Buh-da-boom .

“It’s too bad that we weren’t able to capture Saddam Hussein. If we had, we could have turned him over to the LAPD.”

Buh-da-boom .

The previous unpaid political announcements have been brought to you by, in order, comedy team Gross National Product, and comedians Beth Lapides and Steve Morris. They’re part of a campaign season that has absolutely nothing to do with the draft movement for H. Ross Perot: political comedy.

In an era of stand-up routines obsessed with last night’s dating nightmare, political comedy sounds like an oxymoron. (Some might chime in that it’s already monopolized by the candidates themselves.) But Morris, Lapides and the folks from GNP are insisting on some equal time to lampoon the national nightmare, and they appear to be getting it.

Morris is doing his late-night solo show, “This Will All Make Sense in a Minute,” at the Burbage Theatre; Lapides’ self-styled campaign for First Lady is dovetailing with her “Un-Cabaret,” co-starring Taylor Negron and Judy Toll, to open May 16 at Highways; and GNP hits the Odyssey Theatre on May 16. (The other D.C. comedy troupe, The Capitol Steps, appears Friday and Saturday at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium.)

Perhaps there’s nothing more to this trend than a campaign season that, just as the World Series turns everyone into baseball fans for a week, is creating a crowd of political junkies.

Morris, though, believes otherwise. “The reason there are so many political comedians,” he says, “is because a lot of people are having a tough time economically. Folks aren’t very political when times are good, but that’s not the case now. After all, the people I’m making fun of have the jobs.”

Lapides’ run at what she admits is “the nonexistent office” of First Lady may be a kind of joke--she never fails to don one of her ultra-stacked blonde bouffant power wigs for a performance or interview--but it’s a serious one. Not only does she see a lot of political comics out there, but a lot of candidates: “I’m glad that people are running, and taking things into their own hands. Hey, at least if they’re running for office, you have to figure that they’re going to vote. Maybe if everyone ran, everyone would vote!”

Gross National Product also seems pleased that candidacies are sprouting up everywhere--all the more to lampoon. “We’re not partisan,” says GNP’s John Simmons, “so we stick it to everybody.”

There are so many to stick it to that GNP, while continuing to perform their ongoing “Bushcapades: An Administration on Thin Ice” in their Washington, D.C., home base, has been able to send a national touring group across the country. At the Odyssey, it includes tour founders Simmons and Marianne Curan, Dai Kornberg of New York’s “First Amendment,” Larry Coven of Chicago’s Second City, Doug Cox of The Groundlings and John Rourke, who was Ronald Reagan in the long-running L.A. production of “Rap Master Ronnie” and George Bush in “Naked Gun 2 1/2.”

“We can form a national company,” Simmons continues, “because there are so many cities full of comedy improv groups now, and improv is a big part of what we do.”

It had better be, since in a topsy-turvy political year--the most volatile, as veteran pundit/reporter Jack Germond has observed, since 1968--who’s in and who’s out has become a full-time job for some of these comics.

“Since the start of the show’s run in March,” Morris says, “Tom Harkin has gone, Bob Kerrey has gone--though we still have a slide of him in the show because he photographs so funny--Paul Tsongas was going down, then out, then almost back in again, then out again. I’ve thrown out tons of material, and then add new stuff, like that ridiculous Newsweek cover of Bill Clinton. These campaigns create and destroy heroes so quickly that Clinton is now an incumbent candidate.”

GNP’s Curan moans at the loss of Tsongas: “Oohh, I’m so sorry he’s gone. What a great subject. I had worked out this whole sketch with him resurrecting himself for the campaign at Easter, and then, we had to drop it. Just like we had to drop a skit on the ‘Democratic downhill slalom.’ ”

Simmons: “We all check out the papers every day, especially the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and then we pull out ideas and try to bring them together. I’ll look at CNN’s Headline News before the show, in case there’s any fast-breaking stuff, which includes making fun of the newscasters, who are just as ridiculous as the politicians.” Curan cites C-SPAN’s uninterrupted broadcasts of speeches and debates as “great for research.”

With all this behind-the-scenes monitoring, the GNPers figure that, within five weeks, 30% to 40% of their show will change.

Would-be First Lady Lapides doesn’t have to worry about any of that, of course. With campaign manager Gregory Miller (her real-life husband), her hairdresser, Mr. Willy, and her publicist in tow, Lapides has an entourage at least as large as the “serious” candidates--among them, the perennially snubbed Democrat, Larry Agran--with whom she shared the podium during a recent taping of “The Montel Williams Show.”

Impervious to the roller-coaster effect of the primary season, Lapides (a longtime regular performer at Highways and other local alternative spaces) has set down a program, whose centerpiece is that, “as First Lady, I would be sleeping with the President. Still, the two jobs should be disconnected, so the President should have his spouse, or her spouse--a few people get the subtlety of that.

“The question is, should the First Lady be a player or a cheerleader? Bush is the education President, so naturally, Barbara has her literacy campaign--which is great, since at least now we can all read George’s lips.”

Acknowledging that Mrs. Bush’s “Millie’s Book”--the children’s tome presumably told by Millie, the First Dog--raked in more than $1 million in sales last year, the bewigged candidate plans her own book, “I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK, But That’s OK!”

“The gist of this campaign is that I’m not OK,” says Lapides, “and all we want of the other candidates is to admit that they’re not OK either. They inhale, they exhale, they have affairs. Fine. Who doesn’t? My program is based on full disclosure, so, for example, I admit that I’ve had an abortion. I wasn’t pregnant or anything, I just had the money and decided that I’d better get one while they still let us.”

As the Lapides campaign juggernaut rolls along, Morris, a former drive-time deejay for KRTH-FM, is happy talking quite firmly about his own inadequacies--and the country’s. Poking at a melon in a Westside eatery, Morris admits, “Sure, I consider myself to be a scared weeny. And it seems like everyone else is running scared too. My models were Mort Sahl and Robert Klein, and what Klein taught me was to tell the truth, and find the comedy in the truth. Hearing his album, ‘Mind Over Matter,’ convinced me that it would be fun to do stand-up. I mean, audiences dug that he made fun of Nixon.

“You find that when Republicans control the White House, they control the media around it, so if you make fun of these guys, you’re a heretic. With them, everything is just so, whereas with the Democrats, they’re like my family, with everyone yelling at each other.”

Unlike GNP, which lampoons both parties, Morris doesn’t hide his sympathies: “Yeah, you might call me close to someone like (N.Y. Gov. Mario M.) Cuomo. The job of the satirist is to mock the powerful, so to mock someone like Jerry Brown or some other outsider is just being reactionary. I spent years on the radio being tactful, doing impressions of Reagan. In the comedy clubs, they want you to go into the toilet or act crazy. But in the theater, I can tell people what I feel: That I think politics is important, that it’s very comforting to not worry about the homeless.”

Suddenly, Morris remembers, “Oh, I forgot a joke tonight! It’s about Clinton, and his problems with his strained vocal chords. Well, as long as he doesn’t have to talk, hey, he may have a chance after all!”