A Comic View of the Convention : Television: Stand-up comedians are having a field day with the presidential campaign and this week some are at the Democratic gathering.

With a vice president who spells “potato” with an “e” and a presidential candidate who says he tried marijuana but didn’t inhale, stand-up comedians have been having a field day with this year’s presidential campaign.

And this week the comics have been going straight to the source: A handful of comedians are attending the Democratic National Convention here to “report” on it for TV shows.

There was Paula Poundstone on “The Tonight Show” Tuesday night, holding up a placard bearing the name “Jay” on it and telling host Jay Leno that she had found it among a group of rowdy California delegates. “Have they talked to you about this or are they totally doing this on their own?” she asked. (It actually had been waved earlier in the evening during a speech by West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller.)

Larry (Bud) Melman filed a report from the Madison Square Garden floor Tuesday for “Late Night With David Letterman,” and Comedy Central, the cable-TV network, also has been looking for comic possibilities in the fate of the Republic, spoofing both the convention itself and the conventions of TV coverage in “Indecision ‘92,” a two-hour nightly mock-newscast with former “Saturday Night Live” writer Al Franken as anchor and comedians Buck Henry and Joy Behar as reporters.

In addition to making comments about the speeches being given at the podium, Franken and the Comedy Central commentators have satirized political reporting and the political process. Analyzing the results of a Comedy Central poll that asked which candidate people would vote for if the election were held today, Franken asked for a breakdown of the 18% who answered “don’t know.” The response: 43% female, 39% male and 18% “don’t know.”

Both “The Tonight Show” and the Comedy Channel plan equal time for the Republican convention in August.

“I think the presence of comedians at the conventions may reflect a reaction to the control exerted by the candidates--and the antiseptic quality of so much TV reporting,” Leno said in a telephone interview. “With carefully scripted ads and the candidates trying to control reporters’ access to them, it’s hard to get a spontaneous reaction out of anybody. Satire enables you to bypass the system because nobody takes you seriously. We can come in and look to see if there are crib notes under the podium.”

“The Tonight Show” has geared itself to the convention this week. Instead of taping earlier in the day as usual, the program is broadcasting live to the East Coast every night after the convention, so that Leno’s monologue can include jokes about that evening’s events. The show also has featured Leno “interviewing” actors impersonating Ross Perot and George Bush, and even NBC anchor Tom Brokaw has gotten in on the action. On Tuesday, he showed Leno a phony edition of the New York Times with the headline, “Perot Set to Pick TV’s Oprah Winfrey as Running Mate.”

“You know, Tom,” Leno quipped, “it’s comforting to know that while the Democratic convention is going on--which could change the fate of this nation--the head anchorman is writing comedy bits for ‘The Tonight Show.’ ”

Brokaw said in an interview that he was enjoying taking a few minutes each night to be part of the “Tonight Show” shtick. “They’re not really doing convention coverage,” Brokaw said, “but it’s not a bad idea for those of us who do what I do to occasionally look at what we do in a more light-hearted context.

“Politics is serious, of course,” he continued. “But it’s also about human foibles. This convention is a big laboratory for life.”