Off-Putting People First: Clinton Presidency Marches In, Doo-Dah Style : With an inaugural parade featuring Elvis clones and a lawn-chair brigade, this won’t be a stuffy Administration.

If humor consists largely of incongruity, most of us should be helpless with laughter about halfway through Bill Clinton’s inaugural parade today.

It isn’t that our new President is innately funny--although the memory of his playing “Heartbreak Hotel” on tenor sax during the opening of the Arsenio Hall show is still worth several yuks--it’s that he belongs to an age group that has always displayed a finely cultivated sense of the ridiculous. How else to explain Earth Shoes, banana smoking and Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey,” the most ridiculous popular song ever recorded?

And how else to explain the presence of not only a lawn-chair drill team, but a unit of Elvis impersonators in Clinton’s inaugural parade?

That’s right. As of this writing, neither the drill team nor the Elvises have gotten the hook, so it appears that the selfsame parade in which John F. Kennedy wore a top hat has evolved into a Doo-Dah clone.

Relating this bit of jollity to my granitic Orange County Republican friends (yes, by golly, we can get along) gives me pleasure in the same way it gives them pleasure to discuss with me the performance characteristics of their Jaguars.

Their political crowd has the bucks, but my bunch knows all the words to “American Pie.” But so what? I’ll drive my Chevy to the levee and they can meet me there in their XJS.

I like to think that the inaugural parade is a bellwether of Washington life for the the next four years, which is why I’m looking forward to a good, zany Administration.

How much room can there be for pompous gasbags when their President has been welcomed to office by guys in white spangled jumpsuits and epoxied black hair twanging their hips all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue?

There is precedent here. Think back on inaugural parades of the past. Nixon’s opus was almost grotesquely pretentious, with herald trumpets and “Ruffles and Flourishes” every time anyone drew a breath, and everyone frowning except Nixon himself, who seemed to be frowning. All in all, it was about as giddy as Republicans ever get. The Carter parade was memorable for its earnest populism. The enduring image is one of the immediate Carter family loping down the avenue, a designated unit in its own parade. None of Carters, however, had quite mastered the approved Rose Queen wave, and Rosalynn, who was wearing high-heeled boots, turned stone-faced after the first couple of miles. Folksy, well-meaning, sore feet. It sounded sort of metaphorical four years later.

With Reagan, it was a multizillion-dollar curtain-raiser to the avaricious ‘80s. More Felliniesque pomp and circumstance, a true Republican bacchanalia with everyone rocking out to the “now” sounds of John Philip Sousa.

Then came Bush. Another expensive parade. Unremarkable, but lots of noise and confusion marred by impaired views of the spectacle due to lack of the vision thing.

And now we’re about to see a massive party thrown for the most powerful man in the world, who just happens to idolize a dead entertainer who was responsible for introducing the phrase “hunk-a hunk-a burnin’ love” into the American lexicon. Who can actually use the words rock ‘n’ roll and communism in separate sentences. Who not only plays the saxophone, but plays one fitted with a metal mouthpiece (trust me, this is significant, and really, really cool). Who orders take-out pizza. Who stays up late and hates mornings. Who apparently sees nothing whatsoever wrong with including in his inaugural parade a group of good Americans who intend to celebrate--in unison, remember--the national back-yard pastime of indolence, sluggishness and sloth.

This is going to be a fun presidency. There’s going to be a guy at the helm who will probably reseed the horseshoe pit and put in a Slip ‘n’ Slide. He’ll be the first President since Kennedy who knows how to throw a tight spiral and probably the first ever who knows how to throw a Frisbee.

Look for the first complaint from the neighbors any day now.