STAGE REVIEW : O.C. Crazies Put Taste on the Line : Sometimes it seems as though the comedy troupe’s latest evening of sketches and improvs, titled ‘Raiders of the Lost Orange,’ is geared toward a bunch of frat boys.

No one knows better than Orange County residents that the rap against the county as a buttoned-up, conservative zone of repressed impulses is as unfair as a mudslinging political ad. But for anyone north or south of the Orange Curtain who thinks the rap is valid, a visit to the Orange County Crazies’ new show of sketches and improvs, “Raiders of the Lost Orange,” will turn them around--fast.

If anything, at their new permanent home at Santa Ana’s Pacific Symphony Building, the Crazies’ big problem is having a slippery grip on good taste. At some points, you have to wonder if the target audience isn’t a gaggle of frat boys taking “Animal House” to the streets.

Roger Lee’s Melvin Belcher, for instance, serenades two female audience members with love songs while he burps uncontrollably. Nick Coletto and Eric Halasz as two executives get excited about “Ferts,” the new “breath mint” for the colon. Suzette Coger’s FM deejay handles a distressed caller who detonates himself.

In moments such as these, the comic’s urge to startle makes the wrong turn into puerility. Other sketches, though, such as the one about a hospital waiting room filled with crime victims (Lee’s man has a knife through his head), take black comedy much further than, say, the Groundlings, of which Crazies director Cherie Kerr was an original member.

Kerr also has some good, instinctively funny people to keep things anchored, led by Lee and Lauri Johnson, a real clown whose impersonation of Barbara Bush, if enough people saw it, would tip the local vote to Bill Clinton.

On the other hand, the instinct to tweak racial prejudices is something that the group lets get out of hand, especially in a video bit that dredges up barrio gang stereotypes. Playing the race card is generally a dicey problem for the nearly all-white Crazies, and though they try to lampoon all races in a skit about drywallers in the recessionary ‘90s and another video scene on a suburban street, the result is cheap. Comedy, like journalism, should give grief to the powerful--a truth the Crazies ought to keep in mind while they skewer the suburbs.

‘Raiders of the Lost Orange’

An Orange County Crazies production. Written by the cast. Directed by Cherie Kerr. Music direction by Allan Sands. With Seanie Bird, Suzette Coger, Nick Coletto, Drake Doremus, Rich Flin, Eric Halasz, Lauri Johnson, Roger Lee, Robert Morris, Jennifer Patterson and Russell Towne. At the Pacific Symphony Building, 115 E. Santa Ana Blvd., Santa Ana. Performances Saturdays at 8 p.m. through Dec. 12 (dark Dec. 5); $12 to $15. (714) 840-1406.